...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.

No, you have a copyright, which allows you to control redistribution of your specific work. You do not, nor should you, have the right to prevent people from learning from it. If I want to disassemble Windows and learn from the code, I'm 100% allowed to do that.

> 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.

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.

Agreed. And well done to the EU for enforcing their own privacy laws.

I think this also proves that the comments one sometimes hears in US media (and certain political circles) to the effect that the EU is supposedly going after US companies, are nonsense.

Well, there are a number historical reasons for why Europe relied on the US for its defence and why the US was totally OK with that.

(1) Europe doesn't exist as a nation: it's like the US (states) without a federal government. That means it doesn't have an integrated defense industry or an army, which in turn means it doesn't have the economies of scale that enable the US to be a superpower. For a very long time this was considered to be in the US interest. US leadership was unquestioned, which had its use. Take e.g. the industrial side of the F16 and F35 fighter planes: those benefited (and continue to benefit) quite a lot from European clientele. The same holds for other types of weaponry. We're talking about 80 bln. in arms sales in 2023 and about 97 bln in 2024 to US allies (see e.g. here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.state.gov%2Ffiscal-y... and here https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.defense.gov%2FNews%2FN... ). Arms sales don't exist in a vacuum: it also represents a buy-in in the US as a partner.

(2) For the entire period from 1945 to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the US and Europe had this bargain: the US provides the military-industrial muscle and the nuclear umbrella, Europe provides the battlefield, about half the manpower, a robust first line of defense plus 100% of civillian casualties in anything but an intercontinental nuclear war. The US had a very clear interest in this tate of affairs, like e.g. keeping the USSR bottled up in a land-locked environment without practical (non-blockable) ice-free ports en a big counterweight to USSR expansion.

(3) For that reason the US had (for that period) been very much against Europe getting anything like a European army or an integrated arms industry. All that changed only when it realised that China had become an economic and military rival. With the Warsaw pact disbanded and Russia no longer a threat, US interests in Europe became more diluted and its commitments there more of a burden.

(4) Europe is indeed ramping up its spending, but there is of course a lead time (of 5-10 years or so) before it can get its 'own' military up to scratch. Withdrawing support before that time means risking Russian expansion once again. That could be an issue if Russia e.g. regains the industrial muscle and mineral resources of the Ukraina.

(5) Currently the situation is that the US has put Europe on notice to get a move on with financing its own defense needs and those of teh Ukraine. And this is having an effect already. Just for the record, US aid to the Ukraine is about 183 bln. by the end of 2024 ehile the EU has contributed slightly more than 50% of all military aid to the Ukraine to date (see e.g. here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fartic... ). There is more to be done, but the figures mentioned by pres. Trump are outright misleading (as usual).

(6) It goes without saying that this development will (over the next 10 years or so) lessen US influence in that part of the world. With that withdrawal of influence there may also be a shrinkage of available military bases, and with it the ability to 'project power' abroad. That in its turn will further contribute to lessening US influence in the world. Whether or not this is desirable is another question, but I think it should be factored into any strategic decision makeing (which in my opionion currently is not the case).

Agreed, to a certain extent.

As I see it, the reason for going to school and acquiring skills such as how to do mathematics and/or how to write clearly and coherently is training the LLM that resides inside our skull. I think that the process of learning something makes you better at learning in general, which then applies to other things as well.

The question is: is it beneficial to learn how to use your brains? That would depend on who or what you want to be. Some people can be very successful being e.g. an Instagram celebrity or an 'Influencer', where being able to spell or do maths just isn't relevant.

On the other hand, I think that people with academic qualifications like being able to spell, write, and do maths can make better use of an LLM than most others who are deficient in that respect.

Of course that's a testable hypothesis. I curious as to how that turns out.

That's what the article is going for, anyway. They want readers to feel like AI is fundamentally insecure, when that's not what happened here.

Fuck making people go to the office. It's a waste of everyone's time and energy, and it causes pollution and more traffic and reduces productivity, all so micromanaging twats can feel good about themselves.

Known VPN services have identifiable server addresses that can be blocked. Instead, you can set up a cheap raspberry pi (or other) at your home and use an encrypted SSH connection to that [raspberry pi] from far away. Then turn on your SOCKS proxy (part of WiFi Details on Macintosh) and check to see that your IP address shows to the world you access as that of your raspberry pi. I do this all the time, including right now. It also helps to watch sports events.

Hmm. I have to admit, the only time that happens to me is when I screw up and there are long running tasks in my process queue.

I'm a SN admin, and I really like SN, so I gotta admit my bias here but... I think it's likely that whoever designs and manages your SN instance doesn't know what they're doing... or didn't, when the system was set up 5-10 years ago, and you're living with old technical debt. I'm not even that great of an admin, and the longest delays we have in our instance are a few seconds... but usually under 1 second for an action like editing or creating tickets.

But it's not difficult (because SN makes all the code and triggers to do heavy customization available) to screw over the performance by making poor choices, and having a ton of synchronous code run every time an action is taken. That's both the glory and the curse of ServiceNow... before it was an ITSM application, it was a rapid prototyping platform. So all that power to code it to do whatever you want is lurking, just beneath the surface, ready to tempt a naive system architect over to the dark side of adding code that runs to every action.

I was a child prodigy who skipped a grade, not dissimilar to Sheldon Cooper, except I was better socialized, and excelled at athletics and was a leader in the Boy Scouts.

I had a real problem getting to sleep at night and waking up in the morning. I would read in bed until late at night and be late in the morning.

At some point in my early 20's I experienced a period of unemployment, and at my doctors advice I started tracking my sleep. We determined that I had a 27 hour biological clock. He said it was unusual, but happened to some people, mostly young men, and that I would grow out of it as I got older. Which didn't really happen, but kind of happened. I have a 24 hour clock but I only sleep 6 hours a night, sometimes less.

Thanks.