Do you condemn KHHAAMAS?

They did.

I choose option 3

Trying not to get scooped by Chromatic, I guess?

Fingernail Spiderhole

Manchurian gold?

Bean lied to*

The pieces fit in my ass

I’m sympathetic to the reflexive impulse to defend OpenAI out of a fear that this whole thing results in even worse copyright law.

I, too, think copyright law is already smothering the cultural conversation and we’re potentially only a couple of legislative acts away from having “property of Disney” emblazoned on our eyeballs.

But don’t fall into their trap of seeing everything through the lens of copyright!

We have other laws!

We can attack OpenAI on antitrust, likeness rights, libel, privacy, and labor laws.

Being critical of OpenAI doesn’t have to mean siding with the big IP bosses. Don’t accept that framing.

Not even stealing cheese to run a sandwich shop.

Stealing cheese to melt it all together and run a cheese shop that undercuts the original cheese shops they stole from.

That’s the reason we got copyright, but I don’t think that’s the only reason we could want copyright.

Two good reasons to want copyright:

1. Accurate attribution
2. Faithful reproduction

Accurate attribution:

Open source thrives on the notion that: if there’s a new problem to be solved, and it requires a new way of thinking to solve it, someone will start a project whose goal is not just to build new tools to solve the problem but also to attract other people who want to think about the problem together.

If anyone can take the codebase and pretend to be the original author, that will splinter the conversation and degrade the ability of everyone to find each other and collaborate.

In the past, this was pretty much impossible because you could check a search engine or social media to find the truth. But with enshittification and bots at every turn, that looks less and less guaranteed.

Faithful reproduction:

If I write a book and make some controversial claims, yet it still provokes a lot of interest, people might be inclined to publish slightly different versions to advance their own opinions.

Maybe a version where I seem to be making an abhorrent argument, in an effort to mitigate my influence. Maybe a version where I make an argument that the rogue publisher finds more palatable, to use my popularity to boost their own arguments.

This actually happened during the early days of publishing, by the way! It’s part of the reason we got copyright in the first place.

And again, it seems like this would be impossible to get away with now, buuut… I’m not so sure anymore.

—

Personally:

I favor piracy in the sense that I think everyone has a right to witness culture even if they can’t afford the price of admission.

And I favor remixing because the cultural conversation should be an active read-write two-way street, no just passive consumption.

But I also favor some form of licensing, because I think we have a duty to respect the integrity of the work and the voice of the creator.

I think AI training is very different from piracy. I’ve never downloaded a mega pack of songs and said to my friends “Listen to what I made!” I think anyone who compares OpenAI to pirates (favorably) is unwittingly helping the next set of feudal tech lords build a wall around the entirety of human creativity, and they won’t realize their mistake until the real toll booths open up.

You’re presupposing the superiority of science. What good is knowing the chemical composition of a mind, if such chemicals are but shadows on the cave wall?

You can’t actually witness a rock, in its full objective “rock-ness”. You can only witness yourself perceiving the rock. I call this the Principle of Objective Things in Space.

Admittedly, the study of consciousness is still in its infancy, especially compared to study of the physical world. But it would be foolish to discard the entire concept when it is unavoidably fundamental. Suppose we do invent teleporters and they do erase consciousness. Doesn’t it say something about the peril of worshipping quantification over all else, that we wouldn’t even know until we had already teleported all of our bread? The entire field is babies. I am heavy ideas guy and this is my PoOTiS.

To quote Searle: Should I pinch myself and report the results in the Journal of Philosophy?

The physical world is the hologram.

Between saccades, fnords, and confabulation, I don’t trust a single thing my senses tell me. But the one thing I know for sure is that I’m conscious.

So, knowing that only consciousness is “real”, why would I assume it can be recreated through atoms (which are a mere hallucination)?

That’s cuz you gotta bring your own TP with you instead of it being provided to you for free. No need for a TP holder tube if you’re not gonna share.

Wait, are US bathrooms communist???

It’s the screenshot equivalent of a TV show cutting to the next scene the moment a punchline lands — usually a stronger and more “taboo” punchline that followed up in the dramatic pause after a previous more light-hearted punchline.

Ms. Pac-Man is the definitive version though.

It’s wild that linear perspective was invented.

Like, for a long time, this was a completely reasonable way to depict the world.

But if I think about my mental model of what I’m seeing at this moment, it’s automatically in linear perspective. It doesn’t feel like I even need to try, it just is that way.

It makes me wonder what other concepts are shaping (or could shape) my perception in such comprehensive and indelible ways.

“Women are the most vulnerable in the world and the most vulnerable are the most vulnerable”