frog 🐸

Obviously I can’t speak for all countries, but in mine, an artist and a programmer with the same years of experience working for the same company will not be getting the same salary, despite the fact that neither could do the other’s job. One of those salaries will be slightly above minimum wage (which is currently lower than the wage needed to cover the cost of living), and the other will be around double the national average wage. So there are in fact artists using food banks right now, and it’s not because the creatives aren’t working as hard as the tech professionals. One is simply valued higher than the other.

I think we’re very much in “agree to disagree” territory here.

University spring term started again this week, and after being loaded down with three more assignments (including another group project), we also got the grades for one of last term’s assignments. I am very, very pleased with mine - 81%, which probably only really means something to those familiar with UK degree-level grading, but I’m really proud of it (while simultaneously being mildly annoyed I couldn’t do better). Last term’s group project grades will be given next week (though we do know that everyone passed, which is 40% or higher), and I’m expecting that one to be quite a bit lower. I’d like something above 70%, but that feels a bit optimistic given what a disaster the project was.

I’ve mentioned on a number of occasions the guy who was on my team project whose combination of arrogance and laziness made him more of a hindrance than a help throughout the entire project. I had a bit of a blow up at him just before Christmas, the culmination of his obstructiveness, his chronic (but not terminal) verbal diarrhoea, and utter lack of ability to accept that no means no. (“Do not touch my laptop” is pretty explicit, and should not prompt an argument about how it’s fine because he knows how to handle laptops.) Anyway, the outcome of this is that he’s spent the whole week sulking in the corner of the room, not talking to anyone. He also ragequit the class Discord server over Christmas, and nobody even noticed he was gone until today when we were getting set up for the new group project. That’s how much everybody likes him. I feel a little bad because I don’t like it when someone feels like they’re not welcome… even when they’re genuinely not welcome because they’re a dick.

If the models were purely being used for research, I might buy the argument that fair use applies. But the fair use balancing act also incorporates an element of whether the usage is commercial in nature and is intended to compete with the rights holder in a way that affects their livelihood. Taking an artist’s work in order to mass produce pieces that replicates their style, in such a way that it prevents the artist from earning a living, definitely affects their livelihood, so there is a very solid argument that fair use ceased to apply when the generative AI entered commercial use. The people that made the AI models aren’t engaging in self-expression at this point. The users of the AI models may be, but they’re not the ones that used all the art without consent or compensation. The companies running the AI models are engaged purely in profit-seeking, making money from other people’s work. That’s not self-expression and it’s not discussion. It’s greed.

Although the courts ruled that reverse engineering software to make an emulator was fair use, it’s worth bearing in mind that the emulator is intended to allow people to continue using software they have purchased after the lifespan of the console has elapsed - so the existence of an emulator is preserving consumers’ rights to use the games they legally own. Taking artists’ work to create an AI so you no longer need the artist has more in common with pirating the games rather than creating an emulator. You’re not trying to preserve access to something you already have a licence to use. An AI isn’t replacing artwork that you have the right to use but that you can no longer access because of changing hardware. AI is allowing you to use an artist’s work in order to cut them out of the equation without you ever paying them for the work you have benefitted from.

The AI models can combine concepts in new ways, but it still can’t create anything truly new. An AI could never have given us something like Cubism, for example, because visually nothing like it had ever existed before, so there would have been nothing in its training data that could have made anything like it. What a human brings to the process is life experience and an emotional component that an AI lacks. All an AI can do is combine existing concepts into new combinations (like combining fried eggs and flowers - both of those objects are existing concepts). It can’t create entirely new things that aren’t represented somewhere in its training data. If it didn’t know what fried eggs and flowers were, it would be unable to create them.

Yep! And it’s not like a lot of creative professionals are paid all that well right now. The tech and finance industries do not value creatives.

I’m actually fine with generative AI that uses only public domain and creative commons content. I’m not threatened by AI as a creative, because AI can only iterate on its own training data. Only humans can create something genuinely new and original. My objection is solely on the basis of theft. If we agree that everybody has the basic right to control their own data and content, than that logically has to extend to artists: they must have the right to control their own work, and consenting to humans viewing it isn’t the same as consenting to having it fed into an AI.

I suspect there would be a lot more artists open to considering the benefits of a generative AI using only public domain and creative commons works if they weren’t justifiably aggrieved at having their life’s work strip-mined. Expecting the victims of exploitation to be 100% rational about their exploiter (or other adjacent parties trying to argue why it’s fine when they do it) isn’t reasonable. At this point, artists simply don’t trust the generative AI industry, and there needs to be a significant and concerted effort to rectify existing wrongs to repair that trust. One organisation offering a model based on creative commons artworks, when the rest of the generative AI industry is still stealing everything that’s not nailed down, does not promote trust. Regulate, compensate, mend some fences, and build trust. Then go and talk to artists, and have the conversations that should have been had before the first AI models were built. The AI industry needs to prove it can be trusted, and then learn to ask for permission. Then, maybe, it can ask for forgiveness.

It should be prohibitively expensive for anyone to steal from regular people, whether it’s big companies or other regular people. I’m not more enthusiastic about the idea of people stealing from artists to create open source AIs than I am when corporations do it. For an open source AI to be worth the name, it would have to use only open source training data - ie, stuff that is in the public domain or has been specifically had an open source licence assigned to it. If the creator hasn’t said they’re okay with their content being used for AI training, then it’s not valid for use in an open source AI.

It’s worth remembering that the Luddites were not against technology. They were against technology that replaced workers, without compensating them for the loss, so the owners of the technology could profit.

Yeah, it’s not flawless, but it’s straightforward to use, which really is the thing you need for this kind of service, since it’s intended to be used by normal people rather than experts. The one and only thing that our glorious Conservative overlords have done well in the last 13 years is modernising a lot of official administrative processes like this so they can be done digitally and without a load of needless complexity.

Pretty much the same in the UK. Most people don’t have to file their tax at all (it’s automatically deducted from wages for most people), but for those that do, you can do it for free on the government’s website, which is largely a matter of saying how much you earned, and any relevant deductions. The government then calculates what tax you have to pay. If your tax affairs are more complicated than that, you’re earning enough that you’re in the “having an accountant is mandatory” territory anyway.

Yeah, it’s one of those things where I understand intellectually that the odds of an incident are incredibly low. I’m sure I read somewhere that air travel is statistically the safest form of travel. But anxiety is definitely not logical!

(Those two bears would have to be very determined to attack me - neither are native here!)

I know, logically speaking, that air travel is statistically very safe. But it’s news like this that makes me anxious about flying later in the year (for the first time in 15 years!), especially as the last leg of my outward journey is on a 737 Max.

Yeah, that is definitely a nice, pragmatic solution. I imagine it’s cheaper for the local council than running public toilets themselves, too.

I don’t patronise restaurants that charge for toilet use. But that doesn’t put me on the side of parents who put their baby’s shitty arse on tables where people eat. Both sides of this “war” are shitty people that I want nothing to do with.

I love that this list includes a lot of smaller and indie games as well as the big releases. Definitely some games there that have caught my eye.

Nope, inflicting excrement on innocent people is never an appropriate response.

Making the other customers suffer, and potentially get ill, isn’t a reasonable response to a business doing something shitty. Just don’t go to restaurants that don’t provide baby-changing facilities. Don’t expose innocent people to your baby’s shit.

In an ideal world, yes, the council-owned toilets would be free to use (and there’d be some mechanism for taxing tourism so the people that are using the beach and car park toilets are the ones paying for them). But I really do think Americans and Australians are overstating how common this is, because it really is a minority of toilets - I only actually know of two in my area, compared to dozens of other toilets that are completely free to use.

Nope, I think they would still be right. No matter what, a baby’s shit-covered arse doesn’t belong on a table in a restaurant. That’s just gross.

I expect that customers will not blame the business for that. They’ll just think you’re an inconsiderate person, like all the other parents who think a table where people eat is an appropriate place for their child’s faeces…