had-me-in-the-first-half.jpeg

Yeah, they make it pretty clear with the big reveal about his history with the place

Yes, that’s a good addition.

Overall, my point was not that scraping is a universal moral good, but that legislating tighter boundaries for scraping in an effort to curb AI abuses is a bad approach.

We have better tools to combat this, and placing new limits on scraping will do collateral damage that we should not accept.

And at the very least, the portfolio value of Disney’s IP holdings should not be the motivating force behind AI regulation.

I’d say that scraping as a verb implies an element of intent. It’s about compiling information about a body of work, not simply making a copy, and therefore if you can accurately call it “scraping” then it’s always fair use. (Accuse me of “No True Scotsman” if you would like.)

But since it involves making a copy (even if only a temporary one) of licensed material, there’s the potential that you’re doing one thing with that copy which is fair use, and another thing with the copy that isn’t fair use.

Take archive.org for example:

It doesn’t only contain information about the work, but also a copy (or copies, plural) of the work itself. You could argue (and many have) that archive.org only claims to be about preserving an accurate history of a piece of content, but functionally mostly serves as a way to distribute unlicensed copies of that content.

I don’t personally think that’s a justified accusation, because I think they do everything in their power to be as fair as possible, and there’s a massive public benefit to having a service like this. But it does illustrate how you could easily have a scenario where the stated purpose is fair use but the actual implementation is not, and the infringing material was “scraped” in the first place.

But in the case of gen AI, I think it’s pretty clear that the residual data from the source content is much closer to a linguistic analysis than to an internet archive. So it’s firmly in the fair use category, in my opinion.

Edit: And to be clear, when I say it’s fair use, I only mean in the strict sense of following copyright law. I don’t mean that it is (or should be) clear of all other legal considerations.

I say this as a massive AI critic: Disney does not have a legitimate grievance here.

AI training data is scraping. Scraping is — and must continue to be — fair use. As Cory Doctorow (fellow AI critic) says: Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.

I want generative AI firms to get taken down. But I want them to be taken down for the right reasons.

Their products are toxic to communication and collaboration.

They are the embodiment of a pathology that sees humanity — what they might call inefficiency, disagreement, incoherence, emotionality, bias, chaos, disobedience — as a problem, and technology as the answer.

Dismantle them on the basis of what their poison does to public discourse, shared knowledge, connection to each other, mental well-being, fair competition, privacy, labor dignity, and personal identity.

Not because they didn’t pay the fucking Mickey Mouse toll.

Excellent interview. Karen Hao is the hero we need but don’t deserve.

I have to stop and take a deep breath every time I see the “can’t put the genie back in the bottle” thought-terminating cliche.

Okay, granted:

Someone foolishly released a chaotic force into the world which is doing irreversible damage and shows no intention of stopping.

What part of that makes you conclude “Well we better just do nothing”?

Ned Ludd shoulda put down his hammer and opened his own factory.

They all look so fuckin done with it.

Like 1 is going “can you believe this shit?”

“What’s penetrating gaze?”

“Not much, what’s penetrating you?”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

A philosophical zombie (or “p-zombie”) is a being in a thought experiment in the philosophy of mind that is physically identical to a normal human being but does not have conscious experience.

Closest I could find:

nationwide exit polling by the Council on American Islamic Relations, found 53% of Muslim Americans voted for Jill Stein. The same poll showed 21% of Muslims cast a ballot for Trump and 20.3% for Harris.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/09/democrats-lose-michigan-arab-american-voters

If we’re talking about atom-by-atom reconstruction, then the question is about philosophical zombies.

I don’t put much stock in any philosophies that say you the constructed being definitely would be a zombie. But I do believe in the possibility that you the constructed being could be a zombie.

Deterministic atheism isn’t at odds with a soul or non-physicalism. See: Walden Pod

Oh I look at that part of my phone. But that’s all I do to it.

Beware the Integrated Drive Electronics of March June

His name is Mike

Everyone deserves love and kindness. Ms Rachel taught me that.

See also: Do artifacts have politics?