Johan Cedmar-Brandstedt’s Post

More on COPIED ACT

“When I asked MidJourney 6 for an image of noise, it responded in an unusual way. Rather than giving me swirling, pixelated abstractions as it often does, it gave me an image of R2-D2. This suggested something to me about how MidJourney is calibrated, and how even in noise, it can find training data. It lead me to think more carefully about how images are produced by these systems. Midjourney often finds faces and other objects in noise prompts, almost as if imposed by a secondary system designed to deliver stronger outputs. That these systems may defer to the intellectual property of Disney is also telling. A common defense is that you get these images by asking for them, and that this is evidence of the user misusing the system to generate IP violations. But this was proof that IP gets into every nook and cranny of the prompt window. (…) Some artists think of AI as a collaborator, but I am unwilling to give it that degree of agency. It’s ok to be against an algorithm, it is ok to question it in unproductive ways that don’t necessarily aim to “improve” it. (…) The aesthetic break is an attempt to say that AI systems, in fact, have a distinct lineage, one rooted in cybernetics, feedback, and the artist’s orientation — simultaneously within and beyond the system of concern. If these works look like video art, data glitches and so on, that’s because I am trying to acknowledge the artistic lineage of generative systems rather than pretend these models have a continuity with film, photography or illustration. The aesthetic break is optimistic. It suggests that we can repurpose a system toward our own uses, rather than being constrained by the streamlined simplicity of corporate user interfaces to achieve corporate, job-replacing ends. The things I make will never put anyone out of work. I have always been an experimental digital artist, and this simply extends the use of these tools into that territory. In the sequence above, you see me taking deliberate glitches, feedback loops and other results of applied misuse of the system and treat the outcome as collage materials. Some of these include “successful” renderings of images — silhouettes, dancers, flowers, etc — which would otherwise have been, in the tradition of digital art and piracy, appropriated from some other source.” — Eryk Salvaggio, breaking things in interesting ways https://lnkd.in/dTFm2Vya

Also cats. If it's an incorrigible menace that shits in the playground sandbox, gets in fights, screams all night and drags in headless mice, it very much can be put back in the bag. With some rocks and a one-way ticket to fish town.

I wish I shared the article author's optimism that this is the end of the Dabus saga. As long as humans anthropomorphise – and we are hardwired to, after all –  we will continue to project emotion, judgment, sentience and will onto objects and ascribe all sorts of inner qualities to them. I hope I'm wrong, but for all I've seen, Stephen Thaler seems to be a true believer -- part of a small but disturbing cadre of fundamentalist idolators in the AI space, having made it his life quest to convince the rest of us that the machine lives and deserves our rights; not as future fantasy, but as present fact. Between the usefulness of this idiocy to other agendas in the ongoing AI wars, credulous media and persistent Pinocchio cultural tropes, I find him likely to remain a distraction for courts and the public, and staffed with pro bono legal expertise. #degenerativeai #propaganda

This is an Nvidia H100. It can math REALLY hard. Last winter it mathed so hard, it nearly sparked sentience. Last summer it mathed so hard, it almost spouted an earth globe out of a dictionary. Give it just a year or two, it will math so hard it sprouts a metabolic and reproductive system to replace a sizeable power grid and a six content supply chain, while solving climate cancer. #AIfacts

Placing market incentives and legal protections around inherently worthless, quantitative processes would wreck markets, skew competition and ultimately destabilize societies.

"Members of the US Senate AI Working Group introduced the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED ACT), which would set federal transparency guidelines “for marking, authenticating and detecting AI-generated content, protect journalists, actors and artists against AI-driven theft, and hold violators accountable for abuses.” The wide-ranging bill would require the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop guidelines and standards for content provenance information, watermarking and synthetic content detection. These standards will promote transparency to identify if content has been generated or manipulated by AI, as well as where AI content originated. The bill also directs NIST to develop cybersecurity measures to prevent tampering with provenance and watermarking on AI content. The bill has been endorsed by multiple industry groups and publishers, including the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), SAG-AFTRA, the Recording Industry Association of America® (RIAA), the National Newspaper Association, and numerous others."

PSA: TOSDR.ORG have a neat Chrome plugin that shows the privacy rating for sites that you visit. https://tosdr.org/