Top-level commenters would do well to read Authors Guild v Google, two decades ago. They’re also invited to rend their garments and gnash their teeth at Google, if they like.

Last Week Tonight’s rant of the week is about AI slop. A Youtube video is available here. Their presentation is sufficiently down-to-earth to be sharable with parents and extended family, focusing on fake viral videos spreading via Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest; and dissecting several examples of slop in order to help inoculate the audience.

What a deeply dishonorable lawsuit. The complaint is essentially that Disney and Universal deserve to be big powerful movie studios that employ and systematically disenfranchise “millions of” artists (p8).

Disney claims authorship over Darth Vader (Lucas) and Yoda (Oz), Elsa and Ariel (Andersen), folk characters Aladdin, Mulan, and Snow White; Lightning McQueen & Buzz Lightyear (Lasseter et al), Sully (Gerson & Stanton), Iron Man (Lee, Kirby, et al), and Homer Simpson (Groening). Disney not only did not design or produce any of these characters, but Disney purchased those rights. I will give Universal partial credit for not claiming to invent any of their infamous movie monsters, but they do claim to have created Shrek (Stieg). Still, this is some original-character-do-not-steal snottiness; these avaricious executives and attorneys appropriated art from artists and are claiming it as their own so that they can sue another appropriator.

Here is a sample of their attitude, p16 of the original complaint:

Disney’s copyright registrations for the entertainment properties in The Simpsons franchise encompass the central characters within.

See, they’re the original creator and designated benefactor, because they have Piece of Paper, signed by Government Authority, and therefore they are Owner. Who the fuck are Matt Groening or Tracey Ullman?

I will not contest Universal’s claim to Minions.

One weakness of the claim is that it’s not clear whether Midjourney infringes, Midjourney’s subscribers infringe, or Midjourney infringes when collaborating with its subscribers. It seems like they’re going to argue that Midjourney commits the infringing act, although p104 contains hedges that will allow Disney to argue either way. Another weakness is the insistence that Midjourney could filter infringing queries, but chooses not to; this is a standard part of amplifying damages in copyright claims but might not stand up under scrutiny since Midjourney can argue that it’s hard to e.g. tell the difference between infringing queries and parodic or satirical queries which infringe but are permitted by fair use. On the other hand, this lawsuit could be an attempt to open a new front in Disney’s long-standing attempt to eradicate fair use.

As usual, I’m not defending Midjourney, who I think stand on their own demerits. But I’m not ever going to suck Disney dick given what they’ve done to the animation community. I wish y’all would realize the folly of copyright already.

Incomplete sneer, ten-yard penalty. First down, plus coach has to go read Chasing the Rainbow: The Non-conscious Nature of Being (Oakley & Halligan, 2017) to see what psychology thinks of itself once the evidence is rounded up in one place.

I’m gonna be polite, but your position is deeply sneerworthy; I don’t really respect folks who don’t read. The article has quite a few quotes from neuroscientist Anil Seth (not to be confused with AI booster Anil Dash) who says that consciousness can be explained via neuroscience as a sort of post-hoc rationalizing hallucination akin to the multiple-drafts model; his POV helps deflate the AI hype. Quote:

There is a growing view among some thinkers that as AI becomes even more intelligent, the lights will suddenly turn on inside the machines and they will become conscious. Others, such as Prof Anil Seth who leads the Sussex University team, disagree, describing the view as “blindly optimistic and driven by human exceptionalism.” … “We associate consciousness with intelligence and language because they go together in humans. But just because they go together in us, it doesn’t mean they go together in general, for example in animals.”

At the end of the article, another quote explains that Seth is broadly aligned with us about the dangers:

In just a few years, we may well be living in a world populated by humanoid robots and deepfakes that seem conscious, according to Prof Seth. He worries that we won’t be able to resist believing that the AI has feelings and empathy, which could lead to new dangers. “It will mean that we trust these things more, share more data with them and be more open to persuasion.” But the greater risk from the illusion of consciousness is a “moral corrosion”, he says. “It will distort our moral priorities by making us devote more of our resources to caring for these systems at the expense of the real things in our lives” – meaning that we might have compassion for robots, but care less for other humans.

A pseudoscience has an illusory object of study. For example, parapsychology studies non-existent energy fields outside the Standard Model, and criminology asserts that not only do minds exist but some minds are criminal and some are not. Robotics/cybernetics/artificial intelligence studies control loops and systems with feedback, which do actually exist; further, the study of robots directly leads to improved safety in workplaces where robots can crush employees, so it’s a useful science even if it turns out to be ill-founded. I think that your complaint would be better directed at specific AGI position papers published by techbros, but that would require reading. Still, I’ll try to salvage your position:

Any field of study which presupposes that a mind is a discrete isolated event in spacetime is a pseudoscience. That is, fields oriented around neurology are scientific, but fields oriented around psychology are pseudoscientific. This position has no open evidence against it (because it’s definitional!) and aligns with the expectations of Seth and others. It is compatible with definitions of mind given by Dennett and Hofstadter. It immediately forecloses the possibility that a computer can think or feel like humans; at best, maybe a computer could slowly poorly emulate a connectome.

Oh, sorry. We’re in agreement and my sentence was poorly constructed. The computation of a matrix multiplication usually requires at least pencil and paper, if not a computer. I can’t compute anything larger than a 2 × 2. But I’ll readily concede that Strassen’s specific trick is simple enough that a mentalist could use it.

Only the word “theoretical” is outdated. The Beeping Busy Beaver problem is hard even with a Halting oracle, and we have a corresponding Beeping Busy Beaver Game.

Your understanding is correct. It’s worth knowing that the matrix-multiplication exponent actually controls multiple different algorithms. I stubbed a little list a while ago; important examples include several graph-theory algorithms as well as parsing for context-free languages. There’s also a variant of P vs NP for this specific problem, because we can verify that a matrix is a product in quadratic time.

That Reddit discussion contains mostly idiots, though. We expect an iterative sequence of ever-more-complicated algorithms with ever-slightly-better exponents, approaching quadratic time in the infinite limit. We also expected a computer to be required to compute those iterates at some point; personally I think Strassen’s approach only barely fits inside a brain and the larger approaches can’t be managed by humans alone.

To be fair, I’m skeptical of the idea that humans have minds or perform cognition outside of what’s known to neuroscience. We could stand to be less chauvinist and exceptionalist about humanity. Chatbots suck but that doesn’t mean humans are good.

Read it to the end and then re-read 2009’s The Gervais Principle. I hope Ed eventually comes back to Rao’s rant because they complement each other perfectly; Zitron’s Business Idiot is Rao’s Clueless! What Rao brings to the table is an understanding that Sociopaths exist and steer the Clueless, and also that the ratio of (visible) Clueless to Sociopaths is an indication of the overall health of an (individual) business; Zitron’s argument is then that we are currently in an environment (the “Rot Economy” in his writing) which is characterized by mostly Clueless business leaders.

Then re-read Doctorow’s 2022 rant Social Quitting, which introduced “enshittification”, an alternate understanding of Rao’s process. To Rao, a business pivots from Sociopath to Clueless leadership by mere dilution, but for Doctorow, there’s a directed market pressure which eliminates (or M&As) any businesses not willing to give up some Sociopathy in favor of the more generally-accepted Clueless principles. Concretely relevant to this audience, note how Sociopathic approaches to cryptocurrency-oriented banking have failed against Clueless GAAP accounting, not just at the regulatory level but at the level of handshakes between small-business CEOs.

Somebody could start a new flavor of Marxism here, one which (to quote an old toot of mine @corbin@defcon.social that I can’t find) starts by understanding that management is a failed paradigm of production and that quotes all of these various managers (Galloway, Rao, and Zitron were all management bros at one point, as were their heroes Scott Adams and Mike Judge) as having a modicum of insight cloaked in MBA-speak.

Trying to remember who said it, but there’s a Mastodon thread somewhere that said it should be called Theocracy. The introduction would talk about the quiverfull movement, the Costco would become a megachurch (“Welcome to church. Jesus loves you.”), etc. It sounds straightforward and depressing.

You may be thinking of checkers. Chess is still open and unsolved, although there is strong evidence that the player who goes first has a large advantage.

I adjusted her ESAS downward by 5 points for questioning me, but 10 points upward for doing it out of love.

Oh, it’s a mockery all right. This is so fucking funny. It’s nothing less than the full application of SCP’s existing temporal narrative analysis to Big Yud’s philosophy. This is what they actually believe. For folks who don’t regularly read SCP, any article about reality-bending is usually a portrait of a narcissist, and the body horror is meant to give analogies for understanding the psychological torture they inflict on their surroundings; the article meanders and takes its time because there’s just so much worth mocking.

This reminded me that SCP-2718 exists. 2718 is a Basilisk-class memetic cognitohazard; it will cause distress in folks who have been sensitized to Big Yud’s belief system, and you should not click if you can’t handle that. But it shows how these ideas weren’t confined to LW.

It’s been almost six decades of this, actually; we all know what this link will be. Longer if you’re like me and don’t draw a distinction between AI, cybernetics, and robotics.

Perhaps! But not because we adopted vibe coding. I do have faith in our ability to climb out of the Turing tarpit (WP, Esolangs) eventually, but only by coming to a deeper understanding of algorithmic complexity.

Also, from a completely different angle: when I was a teenager, I could have a programmable calculator with 18MHz Z80 in my hand for $100. NASA programmers today have the amazing luxury of the RAD750, a 110MHz PowerPC chipset. We’re already past the gourmet phase and well into fusion.

Well, actually, Nurdrage was the synthesizer of pyrimethamine on Youtube (here is their playlist), and if one actually watches their videos then they will quickly learn that there are legal reasons why the synthesis pathway is so convoluted. We’ve discussed this before here and here. I agree that there’s no substitute for spectrographic analysis.

this … can be reasonably expected to kill people

Better not look up how much of the USA bans reproductive care for women and how many excess deaths that causes; hundreds of people/year already die from a lack of care and medicine.

A German lawyer is upset because open-source projects don’t like it when he pastes chatbot summaries into bug reports. If this were the USA, he would be a debit to any bar which admits him, because the USA’s judges have started to disapprove of using chatbots for paralegal work.

so in some way, they are trying to cobolify backyard chemistry.

We must have watched different presentations; the one I watched was about producing hormone-replacement therapy for trans folks.

Thiel isn’t known to be among any laity. He was raised as some flavor of evangelical fundie and follows a specific philosopher, René Girard. He generally hasn’t gotten a pass on being queer from the wider Christian community, and if you want to hear some psychoanalysis of his closet then you might enjoy the relevant Behind the Bastards: How Peter Thiel Became the Gravedigger of Democracy.

I’ve been giving professional advice about system administration directly to CEOs and CTOs of startups for over half a decade. They’ve all asked about AI one way or another. While some of my previous employers have had good reasons to use machine learning, none of the businesses I’ve worked with in the past half-decade have had any use for generative AI products, including startups whose entire existence was predicated on generative AI.

Don’t sign up for a dick-measuring contest without measuring yourself first.