Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and is now exploring new vistas in social media.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I think there’s a significant difference between “neutral” and “diverse”.

    For example, Reddit is big enough that if you find yourself holding an unpopular opinion in some particular subreddit and you’re getting battered with downvotes, you can probably find some other similar subreddit that’s more friendly to whatever view you’ve got that’s drawing ire. People speak derisively of “bubbles” and “echo chambers”, but really, why should I stick around and try to engage with people who just don’t want you around? Communities naturally tend to segregate themselves along ideological lines like this.

    Here on the Fediverse the population’s too small to support quite so many diverse communities yet, unfortunately. So if you’ve got an unpopular minority view you can end up stuck with either routinely finding yourself serving as a punching bag or just not posting. That’s no fun.




  • The article opens:

    When I first started colorizing photos back in 2015, some of the reactions I got were, well, pretty intense. I remember people sending me these long, passionate emails, accusing me of falsifying and manipulating history.

    So this is hardly an AI-specific issue. It’s always been something to be on guard for. As others in this thread have pointed out, Stalin was airbrushing out political rivals from photos back in the 30s. Heck damnatio memoriae goes back as far as history itself does. Ancient Pharoahs would have the names of their predecessors chiseled off of monuments so they could “claim” them as their own work.




  • you know that a company putting a thing in their terms of service doesn’t make it legally binding, right?

    And you know that doesn’t necessarily imply the reverse? Granting a site a license to use the stuff you post there is a pretty basic and reasonable thing to agree to in exchange for them letting you post stuff there in the first place.

    hence why they all suddenly felt the need to update their terms of services

    As others have been pointing out to you in this thread, that also is not a sign that the previous ToS didn’t cover this. They’re just being clearer about what they can do.

    Go ahead and refrain from using their services if you don’t agree to the terms under which they’re offering those services. Nobody’s forcing you.




  • You mean before or after all the sites updated their ToS it so that they were legally in the clear to sell user posts to AI training companies?

    The ToSes would generally have a blanket permission in them to license the data to third-party companies and whatnot. I went back through historical Reddit ToS versions a little while back and that was in there from the start.

    Also in there was a clause allowing them to update their ToS, so even if the blanket permission wasn’t there then it is now and you agreed to that too.

    Learning from things is a very obviously a completely different process to feeding data into a server farm.

    It is not very obviously different, as evidenced by the fact that it’s still being argued. There are some legal cases before the courts that will clarify this in various jurisdictions but I’m not expecting them to rule against analysis of public data.



  • in the case of ai generated media, companies just decided that they just had the rights to use existing published media, so they harvested it without consent or compensation

    Have you read the ToS of your favourite social media site lately?

    In any event, it might well be that companies (and you yourself) have the rights to use existing published media to train AIs. Copyright doesn’t cover the analysis of public data. I suspect that people wouldn’t like it if copyright got extended to let IP owners prohibit you from learning from their stuff.