Brought to you by the American National Automation Laboratory Corp?

FFS, the issue is not that the AI model "copies" the copyrighted works when it trains on them--I agree that after an AI model is trained, it does not meaningfully retain the copyrighted work. The problem is that the reproduction of the copyrighted work--i.e. downloading the work to the computer, and then using that reproduction as part of AI model training--is being done for a commercial purpose that infringes copyright.

If I went to DeviantArt and downloaded a random piece of art to my hard drive for my own personal enjoyment, that is a non-infringing reproduction. If I then took that same piece of art, and uploaded it to a service that prints it on a T-shirt, the act of uploading it to the T-shirt printing service's server would be infringing, since it is no longer being reproduced for personal enjoyment, but the unlawful reproduction of copyrighted material for commercial purpose. Similarly, if I downloaded a piece of art and used it to print my own T-shirts for sale, using all my own computers and equipment, that would also be infringing. This is straightforward, non-controversial copyright law.

The exact same logic applies to AI training. You can try to camouflage the infringement with flowery language like "mere extraction of relationships between components," but the purpose and intent behind AI companies reproducing copyrighted works via web scraping and downloading copyrighted data to their servers is to build and provide a commercial, for-profit service that is designed to replace the people whose work is being infringed. Full stop.

"The issues raised have been subject to rigorous engineering examination under [Federal Aviation Administration] oversight," the company said.

You mean the guy you handed an FAA sash to and told "it would be an awful shame if this didn't get signed off on, we'd have to make some pretty severe job cuts, wink wink?"

Yeah, happy to help. Sealioning really fucking sucks, because the only ways to counter it are:

• Insult the troll until they go away

• Refuse to play their game and give short, pithy responses without doing any research (or not linking the research you did)

• Ignore the troll entirely

• Copy your response and paste it whenever you see the troll asking the same question (which someone is doing in this very thread)

• Create and maintain a collection of ready-to-go arguments with citations that you can copy/paste at the drop of a hat, which is a fair bit of work in of itself

In case it's not obvious, most of the counters for sealioning look almost exactly like trolling itself, and it's almost impossible to tell a sealion from someone apart looking for a legitimate discussion at first glance--short of keeping track of individual usernames and watching them in multiple threads, the only way to know if someone is a sealion for sure is for at least one person to feed the troll at least one good response. It's what makes sealioning such an insidious technique, because fighting a sealion almost always results in a lower quality of discussion itself, giving the sealion another type of victory.

I bought a funny drawing for $20 from Goodwill showing toony animals in an 80s office setting. It was extremely dated, down to portraying a mainframe computer with eyes on it, but there's something about it I find absolutely charming and it has a place of honor above my fireplace.

A few years later, I looked it up on a whim, and it turned out to be a limited-run lithograph called "Bits" by Robert Marble in 1983, and it was worth a hundred bucks then (closer to $250 now). There's only 750 copies of it ever made, and mine is a relatively low number (122).

There's no way in hell I'm selling it, but it's a really neat little story!

It's not that song, it's a song that plays during the climax of End of Evangelion and has very strong themes of suicide and loss, played over an upbeat, lively tune. Just imagine these lyrics over something reminiscent of a Beatles song circa Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band:

*I know, I know I've let you downz

I've been a fool to myself

I thought that I could

live for no one else

But now through all the hurt and pain

It's time for me to respect

the ones you love

mean more than anything

So with sadness in my heart

(I) feel the best thing I could do

is end it all

and leave forever

what's done is done it feels so bad

what once was happy now is sad

I'll never love again

my world is ending

It's one of my favorite scenes in animation, just because of how utterly fucked up everything is and how many layers there are to everything

Still orders of magnitude less effort than actually learning to draw for yourself and making something actually creative

But please do go on about how your pink slime regurgitated by an LLM trained on stolen artwork scraped from hundreds of thousands of actual artists requires so much effort and creativity

In my last apartment, the flush lever broke and I couldn't be arsed to call maintenance, so I popped over to the hardware store and grabbed a replacement for 5 bucks. As I was putting the lid back on after installing the replacement, it shattered into 3 huge shards in my hand while I was holding it, for no apparent reason. One of those shards cut deep into the side of my hand like a hot knife through butter, right where my pinky met my palm. Barely avoided severing a nerve, and I still have a visible scar where it cut me.

Porcelain is no fucking joke, man.

Hell, I've seen accusations that the author of this mod made literally that exact mod for BG3 that "fixed" Wyll and his father by turning them white. Shit's disgusting.

I can already taste the food poisoning and explosive diarrhea!

My understanding is that filling the seats in the various committees left vacant by Feinstein's death requires a vote by the full Senate. Which can be filibustered. Because of course it fucking can.

A moment of silence in honor the sacrifice of Kent Shocknek, taken from this world too early while trying to jump his car o7