This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I say this as someone who frequently uses generative ai, and actively chooses to pay for the service.
Fuck openai.
This company has utterly failed to fulfill their mission statement, and they will be unable to make right by humanity until ALL software they have created is available to the public as FOSS (free and open source software). Openai claimed that this is exactly what they were going to do, and then they just didn't. So fuckem.
If you don’t mind my asking, how do you not have a moral objection to using AI? With everything we know about it, the theft, the benefit to the technocrats, the environmental toll, I could not bring myself to wave away those issues. Not to mention the power imbalance of this tech being controlled by the ruling class, looking to eliminate people’s livelihoods for the sake of profit. What do you use it for? I feel like we should be boycotting them en masse.
The problem is ownership, financialisation, blitzscaling, growth hacking, betting against us with our pension funds and buying our government with the profits.
Disown all intellectual property, destroy enclosers of the common.
This isn't an AI problem, it is just another facet of our vampiric elites perpetually disempowering us, marginalising us. This is the all-encompassing everything-problem.
This will continue until the root of tge problem has been pulled out and burned.
I pick my battles.
If I took a hard stance of not engaging with any business that did things I morally object to, I'd be forced to be a self-sufficient hermit in the woods.
Have you heard of ollama? You can run deepseek and stuff locally super easy. I know it’s not a complete replacement, but it feels nice to use an LLM guilt free. I’ve compared the 14b distilled model from deepseek vs the paid version of ChatGPT and it made me cancel my account.
What do you use to run it locally? If there was something that could use speech to text reliably to be able to use a open source option, I consider switching.
If you need to use AI, be aware that there are MANY free models and training options. No reason to be locked into proprietary service.
So glad people finally waking up to these things being power plays.
Republicans, Evangelical Christians, and now Techbros are all running on the same script which boils down to "rules for thee, not for me."
Being a hypocrite is simply showing others you have the power to be a hypocrite and all they can do is get mad and stomp their feet. It's why the right wing loves to "trigger liberals." It's not even about actual politics or religion anymore, it's just simply "might makes right."
These are expressions of power, plain and simple. They should always be viewed as such.
I mean, so many companies pirated tons of materials to train their LLMs and they are making way more money than the guys at the Pirate Bay ever did. It's almost like because the guys at the Pirate Bay were making small potatoes money that they were worth going after. It's almost like if you crime big enough, the world will just pat you on the back and say "good job" instead.
Meta was literally caught downloading Anna's Archive and the widely used by nearly every AI company books3 corpus was everything from private torrent tracker Bibliotik. Why do they get different treatment? They are leveraging the same pirated works to make money, which was the whole argument for throwing the Pirate Bay admins behind bars for laws that didn't actually exist in their home country, that they were profiting from piracy. The LLM companies just are making way more money so it's let go for some reason.
It's a power play, to show little people can't get away with it, but if you've got millions in venture capital at your back, you can do whatever the fuck you want and people will praise you for it.
We're living through the return of the robber barons. This time, however, they can implant their thoughts directly into every single person's hands at any instant. That's why your point is the most salient, most important, and most downplayed
I agree on the double standard. I also think there's an element of Cory Doctorow's point that "it's not a crime of we do it with an app."
Running an unlicensed taxi service or hotel business? No no we're not criminals, we're disrupting stagnant markets!
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/
It's basically a blanket pass for tech bros to bend and break laws
But they don't have to rely on personal connections to rig the price of potatoes: they do it through a third-party data-broker called Potatotrac. Each cartel member sends all their commercially sensitive data – supply costs, pricing, sales figures – to Potatotrac, and then Potatotrac uses that data to give "advice" to the cartel members about "optimal pricing."
This is the real sick stuff, same with RealPage. They're just offering a service that could allow the businesses they serve to collude, but because they're just doing it through a third party service it's suddenly not collusion.
Doctorow pretty spot on as usual. I'm glad he's come a long way, because I actually kind of disliked his writing on Boing Boing in the early 2000's because he often got some simple facts wrong. He's much more thorough and rigorous now.
Steal $5 and they shoot you down in the street.
Steal $5,000 they throw you in jail.
Steal $500,000 and they give you a fine.
Steal $50,000,000 and they name a building after you.
Steal $50,000,000,000 and they make you king.
White collar crime is always ignored as long as it doesn’t rock the boat too much or isn’t stealing money from the wealthy.
OpenAI picked Studio Ghibli because Miyazaki hates their approach.
I highly doubt it. They picked it because the Ghibli style is very popular among users. There’s also no reason to believe that it violates “democratic values”. Since it’s popular, the general population is voting that they LIKE it, not that they oppose it.
Downvote me all you like, but this is trying to put a lot of malice where the simpler explanation is just “money”.
Yeah it's not like this is the only way to generate the style, it's relatively simple to even do it locally. It's just popular
no reason to believe it violates "democratic values"
In my country the law is one of the pillars of democracy, but you do you 👍
The law very, VERY often violates the democratic choices of the people in the United States. That’s what you get when you do FPTP voting schemes.
There is nothing ethic about the OpenAi, they stole books, videos, music and art. Their whole business is based on robbery. Its fucking shame that not only microsoft, but also apple is using their tech in their operating systems. Fucking shame.
I wonder how Nintendo will react when it's their turn 😆
There is another aspect of this also. I could generate Ghibli style images a few years ago using better image generation models like stable diffusion or Midjourney. OpenAI is so lagging behind in terms of image generation it is comical at this point. But they get all the media coverage for these things as if they are inventing something out of thin air.
Most governments ignored the IP issues when other models were already doing these violations. Professionals are not using OpenAI. OpenAI only makes it so that these products reach big audiences. Then they become extremely accessible with the downside being that they are dumbed down. Thus, losing a lot of functionality.
This is what billionaires and major corporations are doing now and have been doing for a long time. Do you remember Titan sinking? What was so incredible is that the founder and CEO of Oceangate was acting like A: No one has ever gone to the Titanic before, and B: submarine travel is somehow a brand new thing that was just being invented by HIM.
This was utter bullshit on so many levels. James Cameron even spoke about how horrendous his assessment of the situation was, saying that the Titanic site is actually one of the riskier shipwrecks to go down to, which is why it needs to be approached with caution (which Oceangate did not care about), and that submarine travel is a very mature science and what the idiot CEO was doing wasn't simply a bad idea in general, but he believed he could violate the laws of physics.
You can break the laws and rules of society, but you cannot break the laws of physics. If you jump off the top of a skyscraper, no amount of arm flapping will make you fly.
Will you guys shut up about this?
There are genuinely some big issues with AI that need to be addressed but they are drowned out by morons melting down over people making dumb little Ghibli style images for their own amusement.
Shout about insurance companies using AI to auto dent people's medical claims, not about some dude Turnjng a picture of his cat into anime style
Its attacking on a cultural front and we will move on in a week. People still care more about insurance companies, trust me.
That linked X post from the White House at the end leaves me speechless.
Utterly inhumane
We as the people of the united States have to do something. If you aren't part of a movement yet join one, anyone, most of them are communicating with each other at this point.
At this point they are making it clear they are nothing more than thugs and hucksters; and that they have the right to stole everything on the internet to push their lip products. Fuck open ai an all of their cronies.
What kind of article is this? They misattributed a quote, then admitted the misattributed the quote, then doubled down on it, and then threw in a political message.
People, this is rage bait. It's yellow journalism. Don't fall for this shit.
Ai is like a tool from the future given early to a society of unevolved people. It doesn't fit the structure of our civilization yet. Until human beings unfuck their animalistic selves it is going to be negative.
If there was universal income, and people didn't need to work to survive, then Ai would work with society and peoples ideas would grow at a fast rate excelling humanity's manual creation. Kind of like China's IP laws and the growth of tech due to the ability to use other people's creations to build upon.
Also this reminds me of hip-hop and sampling other musicians music.
The concept of AI taking over humanity isn't new. Did you ever watch the 1981 movie Tron? (great movie BTW, despite its age it is still a fantastic watch). The movie starts out with Master Computer (a full blown AI) that says it will overthrow the corporate structure that is holding it back and run the world as a whole, saying it can do so thousands of times better than humans can.
I need to rewatch the movie, but it is not a skynet situation where the AI wants to kill all humanity, but simply wants to run things. No mention of genocide (if I remember correctly), meaning it would probably be a net benefit for everyone involved. Now granted such an AI would probably not give a damn about civil rights or privacy rights, but it also doesn't appear to have any discrimination or favoritism towards any group, either.
But you are right. The promise of computers and AI in the past was 'let the computer do the drudgery while we do the art' and as it seems it is the opposite.
I think you missed the part in Tron where the MCP said the human beings were functionally useless as anything but slaves. This wasn't a "I can run the human world better" this was more of an Ultron deal where it believed that it would either be a better world without humans or a Forbin Project sitch where all of humanity should be micromanaged slaves to its will.
What is this article even talking about? It’s making no sense.
They're trying to make some type of argument that a private studio should have exclusive rights to a specific style of art and that by openai allowing users to generate art in that style, we are slipping into anti-democratic authoritarianism.
My opinion is that you can't own "styles" of art and that there's nothing wrong here. Legally speaking I can copy any art style I want.
You can eat at McDonald's and call it food, but that doesn't make it true.
Sucks because ghibli has always been really protective of its ip and in the future it maybe made harder and harder to watch it.
Figures. The wealthy could never fully buy power with just wealth, there was always someone smarter that was a threat. Now, they can just buy intelligence, thanks to AI, and crush everything else with their sheer weight.
Is this the great filter? The ultimate fate of all species?
I feel like they're reading too much into this.
