Indeed. I never understood, let alone bought into, the NFT hype, but I think VR is a good reference point for AI:
There was a real, genuine product in the Oculus Rift. It did something that was an incremental improvement over the previous state of the art which enabled new consumer experiences for low cost.
The Metaverse was laughable, and VR got glued to a lot of things where it added zero value, or worse negative value, for example my attempts to watch pre-recorded 3D video gave me nausea because the camera can only rotate, not displace, with my head movements.
Compare and contrast with AI:
LLMs and Diffusion models are also real, genuine products, that are incremental improvement over the previous state of the art which enabled new consumer experiences for low cost.
A lot of the attempts to integrate these AI have been laughable, and have added zero-to-negative value.
I didn't mean it as VR being useless - I'm sure it can be useful for some applications or fun for gaming - my point was that you shouldn't fear getting left behind just for not having an Apple Vision Pro app or a land in the Metaverse :)
Another way to see this: Hammers can be useful, the Internet can be useful, but this doesn't mean that as a hammer manufacturer you should make your next hammer an IoT product ASAP or you will be left behind.
Just wanted to note that even after the bad publicity that companies like Meta (ugly avatars, unusable bland virtual spaces) or Apple (overpriced device with no software or content) have given to VR, some people tend to regard it as dead even though there is quite a vibrant user and creator community doing some incredible things (even just what people do with VRChat is amazing!). And there are even companies that seem to get it (Valve).
In a sane world I would have agreed but in the US at least I am not certain this is still true: In Bartz v. Anthropic, Judge Alsup expressed his views that the work of an LLM is equivalent to the one of a person, see around page 12 where he argues that human recalling things from memory and AI inference are effectively the same from a legal perspective
Clean room reverse engineering always involves a wall of some kind between the person figuring out how the tech works, and the person creating the new tech. Usually the wall is only allowing one-way communication via a specification of the behavior of the old tech, perhaps reviewed by a lawyer to ensure nothing copyrighted leaks across.
Thanks for those links, I read a couple of the cited comments on those cases and still cannot find any mentions of restrictions for engineers who at some point in the past had access to the code.
Nordstrom Consulting v. M&S Technologies, which is possibly the most relevant case, describes a process for developing under a clean room environment and from what I understand it seems to focus on isolation of engineering teams and resources (except when required for interoperability). I did not find mentions of assessing the cohort of engineers for prior access to the copyrighted material but if I have missed that please let me know.
I also wanted to say that I am not asking this because I am thinking to start an unethical license laundering business, I am only trying to understand the meaning of making LLMs legally equivalent to human workers.
That's strange, which OS? I am on Arch and also on 145 and I get the "Ask an AI Chatbot" in the context menu. The settings used to work in the past so I am not sure what's going on.
I believe these are all the settings I have disabled for AI:
Why does this look horribly wrong to me. Why does a union need a fundraiser? Shouldn't they have hold tight belt and have significant war chest for this? Or take extra fees from the new members?
It does feel wrong because in our society having access to more financial resources often translates to better representation in the courtroom. This is similar to how donating to organizations like the EFF can provide more justice to those who are not multibillion-dollar corporations.
I really wished they would also let you disable those very annoying modal popups announcing yet-another-chatbot-integration twice a week: My company is already paying for your product, just let me do my work ffs...
That's just like your opinion man, I see it through rose coloured glasses as a poem from more naive times back when some folks still had some hope... This was way before vulture capitalism fucked everything up you know, or at least that's how I remember it but I was like 10.
Not everyone was into this hopeful vision of cyberspace though, Masters of Doom comes to mind.
You’re right (as someone a bit older but also with rose-tinted glasses).
There was a feeling of hope on the Internet at the time that this was a communication tool that would bring us all together. I do feel like some of that died around 9/11 but that it was Facebook and the algorithms that really killed it. That is where the Internet transitioned from being about showcasing the best of us to showcasing the worst of us. In the name of engagement.
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