via https://duckduckgo.com/?q=DuckDuckGo+AI+Chat&ia=chat&duckai=1 with GPT-4o mini

The FTC under Biden has begun to push back against tech monopolies.

Maybe you could call it recoupment but it doesn’t have quite the same ring. It’s not quite the same thing, either.

You could also talk about coercive monopolies but that doesn’t mean exactly the same thing.

You should accept Unicode; if doing so, you must count each code as one char.

Hmm. I wonder about this one. Different ways to encode the same character. Different ways to calculate the length. No obvious max byte size.

I think, for a lot of people, technology has come to mean a few websites, or companies.

There are a few lemmy communities dedicated to AI, but they are very inactive. Basically, I’d have to send you to Reddit.

Americans may be seeing serious savings in that picture.

I am seeing serious evolutionary pressure on liver genetics.

can exercising one’s agency over their body really be considered “rent-seeking”?

First of all, I am not impressed by this kind of emotional manipulation. You are talking about exercising agency, power, over other people’s bodies. If someone, whether a VFX artist or a hobbyist, would use a likeness without a license, you want them stopped. At the end of the day that means that LEOs will use physical force. You may not think of something like copyright being enforced through physical force, but that is what happens if someone steadfastly refuses to pay fines or damages.

Enforcing intellectual property, like a likeness right, means ultimately exercising power over other people’s bodies. The body whose likeness it is, may not be involved at all. In the typical case of a Hollywood star, they would be completely unaware of what the enforcers are doing.

Rent-seeking is an economics term. Rent-seeking is as rent-seeking does. You may feel that society - the common people -have to suffer for “justice”, like people were expected to suffer for the diving rights of kings. But you can’t expect people not to remark the negative consequences. Well, I guess if I were living in such a monarchy, subject to the divine right of a king, I would be quite circumspect. I wouldn’t want to be tortured or imprisoned, after all. And yet it moves.

Usually, rent-seeking involves property, and yet the right to own property is internationally recognized as a human right.

to alienate workers from their labor and exploit them.

We’re probably not on the same page regarding terminology. This sounds like a Karl Marx idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx’s_theory_of_alienation

Obviously that’s not what you mean. I guess I’m just surprised to see these hints of leftism mixed in with conservative economics.

SAG-AFTRA

…is fundamentally a conservative organization. It’s no coincidence that Ronald Reagan was president of SAG, before becoming president of the US. They will favor the in-group over the out-group and the top over everyone at the bottom. That’s what the doctrines you are repeating are designed for.

The memory feature of ChatGPT is basically like a human taking notes. Of course, the AI can also use other documents as reference. This technique is called RAG. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation

Sidenote. This isn’t the place to ask technical questions about AI. It’s like asking your friendly neighborhood evangelical about evolution.

I have the distinct impression that a number of people would object to the purpose of re-hosting their content as part of a commercial service, especially one run by Google.

Anyway, now no one has to worry about Google helping people bypass their robots.txt or IP-blocks or whatever counter-measures they take. And Google doesn’t have to worry about being sued. Next stop: The Wayback Machine.

Are you really conflating people who make their living based upon their acting skills and likeness with landlords?

No. I am talking about rent-seeking.

Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions, and potential national decline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

You could argue to what a degree landlords or Elon Musk are engaged in rent-seeking. Likeness rights are a clear example, though.

Imagine in the near future. Some famous person licenses their likeness for a show, game, movie. Maybe the producer hires an unknown actor that is then digitally altered into the famous person, like a more advanced version of Gollum. Or maybe the VFX artists can do it on their own. These guys work. The famous person does nothing. They might be dead, while the rights-owners still collect license fees.

Shocked? You’d think all the people outraged at having their websites scraped would be delighted. That’s probably the real reason for this.

There’s probably not many people here who understand the connection between Invidious and scraping.

Meh. As a german, it just doesn’t make me tingle quite like sending tanks to the east.

Why do you believe that?

From the source:

Our primary approach calculates training costs based on hardware depreciation and energy consumption over the duration of model training. Hardware costs include AI accelerator chips (GPUs or TPUs), servers, and interconnection hardware. We use either disclosures from the developer or credible third-party reporting to identify or estimate the hardware type and quantity and training run duration for a given model. We also estimate the energy consumption of the hardware during the final training run of each model.

As an alternative approach, we also calculate the cost to train these models in the cloud using rented hardware. This method is very simple to calculate because cloud providers charge a flat rate per chip-hour, and energy and interconnection costs are factored into the prices. However, it overestimates the cost of many frontier models, which are often trained on hardware owned by the developer rather than on rented cloud hardware.

https://epochai.org/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-train-frontier-ai-models

It’s like with people who are stuck in traffic. They are frustrated and so they wish for for change. The wish for more roads (and bigger cars, faster cars, more cars). The natural human reaction when something doesn’t work is: Try the same thing harder! It’s not to try something else.

I think we have all been in situations where we failed to push a door open, and so we angrily pushed again harder before easily pulling the door open.

I see lots of people agreeing that there is a problem, as evidenced by the popularity of the term “enshittification”. But the reaction is to double down on the policies that got us here.

You can see that in AI threads here. People call for more intellectual property, more silo-ing of data. Of course, that won’t work and Doctorow has explained that on several occasions. https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-05-13-spooky-action-at-a-close-up-invisible-hand-5c873636eb47

Other institutions that are apparently considered trustworthy also “side with AI companies”, in that they understand that fair use is in the interest of society. For example, libraries including the Internet Archive. https://www.librarycopyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/AI-principles.pdf https://blog.archive.org/2023/11/02/internet-archive-submits-comments-on-copyright-and-artificial-intelligence/

You do realize that the vast majority of voice actors are not famous right?

Yes, that’s the point. You are not defending voice actors by demanding likeness rights.

I am not sure why this is so difficult to understand. Maybe there is some confusion about the technology. You only need a few seconds of audio to clone a voice. You don’t need hours of audio from a professional. That’s why the tech can be used for scams. Likeness rights won’t create jobs for voice actors. Only free money for famous people. You can also generate random voices.

Leading AI voice companies like Elevenlabs require you to have permission to clone a voice. But how can they check if their customers are being truthful? In practice, it simply means that famous people, whose voices are known, may not be imitated. Likeness rights, by their nature, can only be enforced, with any kind of effectiveness, for the rich and famous.

OpenAI tried to hire Johansson. When she declined, they hired a different, less famous actress. Maybe they did that to defend against lawsuits, or maybe it gives better results. If they had engineered a nonexistent voice, it would be almost impossible to make the case that they did not imitate Johansson. But still, everyone is talking about that poor famous, rich person who got ripped off. What about the actress who actually provided the voice? I guess she can look for another job, because Johansson owns that voice type.

one of the few influential unions in the US

You mean Ronald Reagan’s old outfit? Do you even know who Ronald Reagan was?

Doctorow also published a transcript of his speech: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-08-17-hack-the-planet-how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess-a26c73418baf

And it’s a landlord’s job to collect rent. It’s Elon Musk’s job to maximize shareholder value.

It’s ok if you watch out for numero uno. I’m not expecting more. But you are wrong to think that this doesn’t affect you. You can’t opt out of society. You won’t be able to avoid products with licensed voices. Your taxes will be paying for enforcement against “pirates”. And most importantly, every new privilege for the rich and famous changes society. With every step, the elite becomes more entrenched and the bottom more hopeless. It’s a matter of enlightened self-interest. If we only reject what directly hurts us individually, then the elites will simply build themselves a new feudalism.

Do you want the rich to be richer? Because that’s how you make the rich richer. People like Scarlett Johanson will be able to license their likeness for millions or billions. Of course, we would have the same rights; the same rights to own a mansion and a yacht. Feeling lucky?

That’s the kind of capitalism that Marx rages against: Laws that let people demand money without contributing labor.