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DarkWiiPlayer commented on Germany eyes 10% digital tax on global tech groups   ft.com/content/39d4678d-a... · Posted by u/saubeidl
StrauXX · 3 months ago
This assumes that gigantic companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google are a good thing that should be emulated.
DarkWiiPlayer · 3 months ago
...or that anyone who thinks "I'd start a company if I could become the next Apple, but otherwise it's pointless" is someone you want running a company.
DarkWiiPlayer commented on Databricks acquires Neon   databricks.com/blog/datab... · Posted by u/davidgomes
flanked-evergl · 4 months ago
Maybe unrelated but Databricks is the most annoying garbage I have ever had to use. It fascinates me how anyone uses it by choice.
DarkWiiPlayer · 4 months ago
With cookies disabled I get a blank website, which is a massive red flag and an immediate nope from me.

Can't imagine someone incapable of building a website would deliver a good (digital) product.

DarkWiiPlayer commented on Paul McCartney, Elton John and other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping   theregister.com/2025/05/1... · Posted by u/rntn
docdeek · 4 months ago
> I want platforms like soundcloud, youtube, etc. to be required to actually send out an e-mail to all of its users "hey we will be using your content for AI training, please click here to give permission”.

Wouldn’t sites like YouTube already have a license to make money off your content anyway? This might be a little out of date but it notes that even though you own the material you upload to YouTube, by uploading it you grant them a license to make money off it, sub-license it to others for commerical gain, make derivative works etc. IANAL but this suggests to me that if you upload it to YouTube, YouTube can license it to OpenAI without needing to inform you or get additional consent. [0]

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/dec/20/who-owns-conte...

DarkWiiPlayer · 4 months ago
You can tell I'm European, but I think in this case, at the time when consumers accepted these conditions they might not have had any way of understanding the ramifications, so effectively there is no informed consent.

In other words, now that people have had a taste of it and know what they're actually consenting to, companies should have to get renewed consent (positive consent, that is) instead of relying on "you agreed to this before it was even a real thing".

It kind of comes down to the you can't put a "you sell your soul" clause in the terms and conditions of a coffee subscription service mentality: at what point do you simply say "this is obviously in bad faith" and declare it void rather than just say "it's silly, but you signed it".

And I think there's massive cultural differences regarding where that line is drawn.

DarkWiiPlayer commented on Paul McCartney, Elton John and other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping   theregister.com/2025/05/1... · Posted by u/rntn
dopidopHN · 4 months ago
Not with that attitude for sure. If the US or / and European union do that, it’s already a big chunk
DarkWiiPlayer · 4 months ago
I wouldn't count on the US anymore, considering today's political climate. But in theory, EU+US could probably make a very compelling argument to China that if all three agree to play nice, nobody gets an advantage because of it, while everyone can benefit from a slower technological development leaving more time to figure out the societal problems.

Ultimately us random people on the internet can't say if China would want that or could be convinced with some other concessions unrelated to AI, but what we can say for sure is that, if China has the will to chill, the west has the negotiating power to match them.

DarkWiiPlayer commented on Paul McCartney, Elton John and other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping   theregister.com/2025/05/1... · Posted by u/rntn
rafaelmn · 4 months ago
Even if you can enforce this somehow, other countries will not. Unlike copyright and patent law in consumer products and content - getting an upper hand in AI race could have huge implications down the line. So the only government that would enforce this is the one that has no chance of competing in this space in the first place (EU)
DarkWiiPlayer · 4 months ago
> Even if you can enforce this somehow

This is super simple to enforce.

For starters, we only really care about the companies developing big commercial AI products, not the people running said models on their home PCs or anything along those lines.

If a company starts offering a new AI model commercially, you simply send someone to audit it and make sure they can provide proof of consent, have their input data, etc.

In most cases, this should be enough. If there's reason to believe an AI company is actually straight up lying to the authorities, you simply have them re-train their model in a controlled environment.

Oh and no, you don't need cryptographically secure random numbers for AI training and/or operation, so you can easily just save your random seeds along with the input data for perfectly reproducible results.

This isn't an enforcement problem, it's a lobbying problem. Lawmakers are convinced that AI will solve their problems for them when reality is that it's still mostly speculation on someone at some point finding a way to make it profitable.

In reality, training and even running AI is still way too expensive to the companies selling them, even without considering the long-term economic impact of the harmful ways they are trained (artists contribute to GDP directly, open source projects do so indirectly, and free services like wikipedia are an important part of modern society; AI is causing massive costs to all of these)

DarkWiiPlayer commented on Paul McCartney, Elton John and other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping   theregister.com/2025/05/1... · Posted by u/rntn
simonw · 4 months ago
Should an AI model be able to answer the question "which team won the superbowl in 2023" if there are thousands of articles out there containing that information but not a single one of them has been licensed for use by AI?
DarkWiiPlayer · 4 months ago
If you could separate the information from the intellectual property, sure; but if the model is also capable of generating a similar article, that's the point where it starts infringing on the IP of all the authors whose articles were fed into the model.

So in practice, no, it shouldn't. Not because that information itself is bad, but because it probably isn't limited to just that answer.

In summary, I think it is definitely a problem when:

1. The model is trained on a certain type of intellectual property 2. The model is then asked to produce content of the same type 3. The authors of the training data did not consent

And slightly less so, but still questionable when instead:

2. The IP becomes an integral part of the new product

which, arguably, is the case for any and all AI training data; individually you could take any of them out and not much would happen, but remove them all and the entire product is gone.

DarkWiiPlayer commented on Paul McCartney, Elton John and other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping   theregister.com/2025/05/1... · Posted by u/rntn
detectivestory · 4 months ago
I'm pretty sure soundcloud has already done this. I don't believe they gave an option to opt-out though.
DarkWiiPlayer · 4 months ago
Then they are stealing people's content and imho should be punished for it. It is baffling that we let companies get away with "if you don't opt out you agree" or even "you can't opt out, delete your account or you agree" and often hide that in generic sounding terms & conditions updates.

Again, I think we should require companies to get the user to actively give their consent to these things. Platforms are free to lock or terminate accounts that don't, but they shouldn't be allowed to steal content because someone didn't read an e-mail.

DarkWiiPlayer commented on Paul McCartney, Elton John and other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping   theregister.com/2025/05/1... · Posted by u/rntn
9283409232 · 4 months ago
Fans of AI see artist like icemen complaining about refrigeration but it is not the same thing. Generative AI doesn't exist without their prior work and it is used to copy it 1 to 1. Make them say things they didn't say or make art they didn't make. It is fair that they want transparency, consent, and payment.
DarkWiiPlayer · 4 months ago
Indeed; this is like stealing the icemen's ice to fuel refrigeration. If some technology makes your job (partly) obsolete, too bad for you. But you shouldn't be forced to contribute to this technology against your will.
DarkWiiPlayer commented on Paul McCartney, Elton John and other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping   theregister.com/2025/05/1... · Posted by u/rntn
DarkWiiPlayer · 4 months ago
My opinion continues to be that AI companies should have to prove that they have consent to use any and all data their models are trained on.

That is, be able to prove a) that their models were actually trained on the data they claim, b) that they have consent to use said data for AI training, and c) that this consent was given by the actual author or with the author's consent.

I want platforms like soundcloud, youtube, etc. to be required to actually send out an e-mail to all of its users "hey we will be using your content for AI training, please click here to give permission".

DarkWiiPlayer commented on America's Coming Brain Drain: Trump's War on Universities Could Kill Innovation   foreignaffairs.com/united... · Posted by u/robtherobber
DarkWiiPlayer · 4 months ago
What you need to understand is that what you are frustrated about isn't you being treated unfairly, it's something that was given to you unfairly in the first place now being yanked away again.

That "disproportionate" competition from minorities you are noticing now is an attempt at artificially offsetting a lack of competition from those minorities that might have allowed you to even get to that place in the first place.

Does this suck? I'm sure it does. But it's not as unfair as you're portraying it. And while dressing your complaints up in fancy words like "meritocracy" or "excellence", the core of what you're saying is still just that nothing should be done to correct injustices that have already taken place.

To use a metaphor: Someone gifted you $10k and now the police is telling you that was from a bank robbery, and you don't want to give it back.

And as for outcomes: the assumption with this strategy is that minorities aren't inherently inferior, and therefore excluding them from the talent pool is anti-meritocratic in the long term. Partially suspending meritocracy to correct these demographic problems is a strategy to, in the long term, gain access to as many talented individuals as possible, so that universities can really pick the best, and not just the best among white men.

So it's fairness + long term efficiency vs. short term meritocracy

Universities are picking the first option. And why wouldn't they: they can do the right thing and gain accent to a larger talent pool. None of this is a "social narrative"; it's all just very simple decisions based on what we know reality to look like.

I think the problem has more to do with the inflationary process of universities turning into glorified trade schools and more of more jobs requiring a degree as a proxy for effort and social status rather than because of any actual skills one needs a university to develop.

In a world where everyone needs a degree, universities will streamline the process of producing degree-holding workers, and the inevitable cost will be their ability to produce "excellence", in any meaningful sense. If you don't like this, the solution is to strengthen "lesser" forms of education, so they are enough to qualify people for jobs. Then Universities will go back to being places where people pursue science and inovation rather than a 9-5

u/DarkWiiPlayer

KarmaCake day1758November 14, 2017
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