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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I’ve switched to streaming and don’t “buy” anything. If content isn’t available on those few streaming sites I’ll try a different provider but I will not “buy” (eg rent for more money).

    It’s all a word game though. I think I actually do have one movie on Amazon. Enough people were over and wanted to watch it that we felt the larger rental fee (“buy” option) was worth it.

    ComiXology is an interesting example of this. They have a shitty UI and an odd attempt to emulate the “collector” experience (obviously I think it’s horrible). It’s like a bad drug trip of skeuomorphism. I quickly decided we’d never “buy” anything there either.


  • “Not incentivized”!

    They like using the current word “buy” because people think it means they “own” a digital copy. Since that’s not true what we’re really saying here is that they like lying because that makes them more money.

    I think the more honest term is “rent”. A normal rental agreement online is for like 48hrs. This is a rental agreement for a much longer, but unspecified, time period.

    You’d think a court case would clear this up. But probably not.









  • “stock will become worthless”

    I’m thinking the opposite might happen.

    If big companies succeed in capturing the knowledge workers market share and transferring all those salaries into their own profits then it will be reflected in the stock prices of those big companies. People, mostly currently rich people, who own those stock will benefit.

    Same as it ever was for other forms of automation or job outsourcing. Why would this be any different?



  • If a person writes a fanfic harry potter 8 it isn’t a problem until they try to sell it or distribute it widely. I think where the legal issues get sticky here are who caused a particular AI generated Harry Potter 8 to be written.

    If the AI model attempts to block this behavior. With contract stipulations and guardrails. And if it isn’t advertised as “a harry potter generator” but instead as a general purpose tool… then reasonably the legal liability might be on the user that decides to do this or not. Vs the tool that makes such behavior possible.

    Hypothetically what if an AI was trained up that never read Harry Potter. But its pretty darn capable and I feed into it the entire Harry Potter novel(s) as context in my prompt and then ask it to generate an eighth story — is the tool at fault or am I?


  • Being able to dialog with a book, even to the point of asking the AI to “take on the persona of a character in the book” and support ongoing is substantively a transcendent version of the original. That one can, as a small subset of that transformed version, get quotes from the original work feels like a small part of this new work.

    If this had been released for a single work. Like, “here is a star wars AI that can take on the persona of star wars characters” and answer questions about the star wars universe etc. I think its more likely that the position I’m taking here would lose the debate. But this is transformative against the entire set of prior material from books, movies, film, debate, art, science, philosophy etc. It merges and combines all of that. I think the sheer scope of this new thing supports the idea that its truly transformative.

    A possible compromise would be to tax AI and use the proceeds to fund a UBI initiative. True, we’d get to argue if high profile authors with IP that catches the public’s attention should get more than just blogger or a random online contributor – but the basic path is that AI is trained on and succeeds by standing on the shoulders of all people. So all people should get some benefits.