Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Spoilation is a big deal... (Score 1) 103

Even if the court hasn't ordered it, once you're sued you have an obligation to retain anything which would be relevant to the lawsuit. It's called a litigation hold, and I work in a field where they're common. That obligation supersedes company data retention policies and requests from other parties (including the plaintiff, if the plaintiff eg. uses Outlook's "recall message" feature to try and remove a message they sent us we're required to ignore it and retain that message and the "recall message" request). It isn't supposed to require the plaintiff to prove anything, it's purpose is to preserve evidence that the defendant possesses so it's available to be found through discovery. And it applies the other way as well, the plaintiff is obligated to preserve evidence too because the defendant's entitled to discovery too.

Comment It's not a copyright violation (Score 1) 240

...unless you can point to the *specific work* that was taken from *without knowing how it was made*.

In other words, just because you train an AI on a bunch of works, it doesn't follow that most of what the AI makes is violating copyright or plagiarizing or whatever. A lot of people are fundamentally pissed off because they don't feel special, or else they wouldn't be yelling at AI users in hobbyist communities who aren't affecting anyone's livelihood.

I have a lot of code out on github, which LLMs have trained on. I have absolutely no right to tell them that the AI can't learn from my code, because my IP rights don't extend that far, and that goes for art as well. I also think it's great that AI enables people, on their local computers, to do something that until very recently was very hard to do.

Comment Re:Nutshell (Score 1) 240

> You can generate images with signatures from the works that were copied, without attribution.

I've never actually seen this happen. What actually happens is that the AI has generalized on what a signature is and figured out that the name of the artist often appears in cursive down in the bottom corner of the image, so it writes a name down there (an artist's name, if someone tells it to make an image "by so-and-so"), but I've never seen a case where the signature matches the signature of the artist to any degree.

The existence of signatures absolutely is not proof that it's copying anything, because the signatures themselves aren't even copies.

Comment Re:Nutshell (Score 1) 240

Copyright allows transformative works.

Also, you're using weasel-y wording here. It does train on entire works, but those entire works aren't saved in the AI itself (this is mathematically impossible giving how many works an AI trains on versus the size of the AI. When it trains on an entire work, it absolutely does generalize on style, concepts, and ideas. Only if the entire work is trained many times over does it memorize that work.

Comment Old problem, new symptoms. (Score 1) 30

This problem is ancient. It's basically the same problem as we had in the days of MS-DOS: the biggest threat vector was clueless users who insisted on installing the latest toy without doing any checking or research. Screen saver, background changer, media player, whatever was new they insisted on having. No matter how many times they got burned, they kept repeating the same mistake. Now we have developers downloading the latest fad package without doing any checking or research, just because it claims some highly-trending keywords or something. Feh.

Comment Positive feedback loops are bad, m'kay? (Score 5, Informative) 208

Can we say "positive feedback loop"? The LLM's designed to produce responses likely to follow the prompt. Producing responses that agree with and support the user's thoughts (whether rational or delusional) tend to elicit more prompts, which makes that sort of response more likely to follow a prompt than one which disagrees with the user. The more the user sees affirmation of their thoughts and beliefs (whether rational or delusional), the more convinced they are that they're correct. Lather rinse repeat until they're thoroughly brainwashed by their own delusions.

This is why engineers apply negative feedback loops to systems to keep them from running out-of-control. LLMs aren't amenable to having such installed.

Comment Re:Lack of information.... (Score 2) 286

No, people didn't originally expect case insensitivity. That happened because technical "experts" assumed they did when mixed-case was added to character sets. Originally, filesystems were case-sensitive but the character sets didn't include lower-case characters so you literally couldn't create a filename with anything except upper-case letters. When lower-case was introduced (mostly with the adoption of ASCII) nobody had any special reason to prefer case-insensitive because the concept was brand new. We could've simply extended the existing practice of comparing directly by character code for filenames, resulting in everyone considering case-sensitive filenames the obvious choice (because it was what all the systems they worked with used) and case-insensitive the aberration.

Comment Driven by the CA industry? (Score 1) 114

I get the feeling this is driven by the Certificate Authority industry rather than any real need. Their biggest concerns are for compromises in the issuing process, where the wrong parties get issued a certificate they shouldn't have. There's a revocation protocol already defined, but the CAs would rather make certificates expire faster than support revocation lists. This incidentally makes them more money issuing new certificates. Maybe we should push for better support of OCSP so compromised certificates can be revoked quickly without impacting anything that wasn't compromised.

Comment Re:This will not safeguard private data (Score 2) 38

If that's your standard for those emails with confidentiality statements (they are not disclaimers), you already have a problem because your device and maybe email provider already read them to determine if they are spam. Also, unless the email body has been encrypted, they've been sat in SMTP server queues in plain text where nefarious people could read them.

Those "disclaimers" aren't really worth anything.

Comment Re:Why would this be theft? (Score 1) 113

I can't see where it's theft, or even any sort of illegal or grey area. They paid for the tickets fair and square, by the lottery's own admission. There's no limit on the number of tickets one person can buy. One person buying $25.6 million worth of tickets or 25.6 million people buying a single $1 ticket, the outcome's the same. And the tactic is a well-known one for gamblers: bet when the payout exceeds the odds of winning. That's all this group did: see that the payout for winning would be greater than the cost of buying enough tickets to guarantee a win, so the bet would be profitable.

Slashdot Top Deals

Asynchronous inputs are at the root of our race problems. -- D. Winker and F. Prosser

Working...