Yeah, that some shumck of an executive at Microsoft happens to have had similar sentimental notions as other members of the literati who hate AI is not an "admission" or even a particularly interesting fact.
Given the process by which "meritocratic" elites are usually selected and trained, it would be odd if this wasn't sometimes the case.
In a quarter with record breaking income of over $100 billion, they also had negative $5.9 billion in free cash flow from their "bank account", because the people selling them chips and building them data centers want to be paid, while the investment itself is depreciated over time.
If my quick search is correct, Google is sitting on a quarter trillion dollars in cash and marketable securities. They could keep doing the negative cash flow thing at this scale for another decade.
It's well reported matter public record that hundreds of thousands people protested, daily. And it's trivial to find polling that showed that about two thirds of Hong Kongers supported the protests, while only a third took your point of view.
Just because it is convenient for the CCP to coerce "confessions" about CIA involvement, and it's convenient for willing accomplices to their dishonest and cruel misrule to pretend that this is relevant, no one else needs to take this seriously.
The person you are replying to seems to have a depth of experience with editing over many years.
It seems pretty clear that AI capabilities are jagged. There are good reasons to believe based on research and the subjective evaluation of experts who are quite friendly to AI that there are some tasks creative tasks that AI has been really quite good at (totally disrupting stock illustrations) some where it does so much better than typical person, but not nearly as well as well as an expert (song creation) and some where, so far, it pretty much fails, and sees almost no progress even as models get better and better. (long form creative writting). Indeed, writting style sometimes seems to fall backwards with recent releases.
Also, it's subjectively, but commonly held to be true that most of the content created when AI can execute well lack taste, unless the human creating with AI has it. The term "slop" exists and in legible for a reason.
I mean, maybe this is just a question of different people speaking about different time horizons.
But it seems perfectly sensible for someone to say that there is a lot of automation that can happen in the near term, and that they see no reasonable evidence that AI can do interesting or even coherent work this space.
I don't know that shallow accelerationist boosterism (or panicked doomer despair ) that handwaves away the distinctive variations AI performnce is that enlightening.
I happened to be the oldest teen in a new subdivision, so I earned a bunch of babysitting money from parents who no longer had to drive 20 minutes to pick up and drop off a sitter for date night.
So I was able to pre-order the C64 before it was released, which earned me a "free" tape drive to actually store programs--the disk drive had to wait a bit. But my serial number was something in the 700s.
I programed it, even if I never became a programmer. But having early and strong intuitions about computers paid off for years to come, and set me up enjoy being an "early adoptor" of things to come, rough edges and all.
The purpose of copyright under the US Constitution, a text relevant to the courts the EFF is addressing here, is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts by giving creators temporary exclusive rights to their works"
It is not to "compensate for the cost of production", nor is it to ensure that business plans of major music publishers happen to be successful.
The EFF is correct to say here that copyright shouldn't be perverted to limiting market competition generally, but limited to protecting a specific works.
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
In what ways does an exclusive right promote the progress of science and the useful arts other than by incentivizing that creative work?
In what way can that incentive work other than by compensating for the cost of production?
Why are you being argumentative? "Promote" and "exclusive rights" was always about compensation for the time and effort invested. You just rephrased what the OP said while claiming to disagree.
It's substantively different. The level of compensation you could expect from copyright needs to be high enough that creators/inventors in general feel that it may be worthwhile to create/invent stuff. That level of compensation may be exactly enough to pay for a musician to make a track. We know this is not the case, it's more like a lottery ticket; some musicians make millions (much more than would be needed to entice them to choose this line of work) and many make almost nothing, but still persist. If you relax copyright provisions so that average compensation is halved, this would presumably have a non-linear impact. Maybe a 50% decrease in expected compensation only results in -10% new works. Maybe in -80%. For example, it is completely implausible that retroactively extending copyright (as has been done) results in any additional works being created at all - just higher profits for existing owners. This also applies to the costs; a higher cost of production (e.g. cost of living) doesn't necessarily need to lead to more stringent copyright restraints, nor lower costs to more lax restrictions.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act criminalizes unauthorized access and damaging protected computers. Police and the FBI investigate such case every day. The swarm of agents is also said to have search for ways to cover their tracks, which looks a little like obstruction of justice.
Lack of criminal intent might be a barrier to bringing a case to trial, but is that something that society should just automatically extend to white collar professionals as matter of class privilege?
Surely have every engineer and executive interviewed by the FBI would be a modest response to days-long, multi-system intrusion into a major AI platform using stolen credentials and zero-days.
And if the law currently written, prevents prosecution in cases of mere reckless disregard for safety, maybe that needs to be changed in the future, so that people can be perp walked if the next target is bank or hospital
Yes, most people using AI for creative projects spend a lot of time and attention mastering their tools, and figure out how to adapt them into their creative processes. AI can dramatically lower the cost of indie productions, while also a allowing a broader range of stories to be told. Even the most successful film makers need to bow and scrape to get their projects funded, democratizing visual media can be a good thing, even if you, personally, are no more likely to do this than you are to pick up Photoshop or record a podcast.
I enjoy making short films with AI. When my latest short screens at a festival in Ocotber, alongside traditional and AI films, hopefully the audience will like it too.
The quick "one shot" video generation might be slop to you, or I. But if someone wants to send it as birthday greeting to their aunt, and they both enjoy it, what business is it of ours?
Given the process by which "meritocratic" elites are usually selected and trained, it would be odd if this wasn't sometimes the case.
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