Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.
Continue reading "Pluralistic: The real AI fight (27 Nov 2023)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: A link-clump demands a linkdump (05 Nov 2023)"
After a grinding, 148-day strike, the Writers Guild of America ran the table, conceding virtually nothing and winning virtually everything.
The most consequential outcome will be data on streaming viewership. For the studios, these numbers are state secrets, revealed on a need-to-know, burn-before-reading basis, even within the studios themselves.
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Podcasting "How To Think About Scraping" (25 Sept 2023)"
Web-scraping is good, actually.
For nearly all of history, academic linguistics focused on written, formal text, because informal, spoken language was too expensive and difficult to capture. In order to find out how people spoke — which is not how people write! — a researcher had to record speakers, then pay a grad student to transcribe the speech.
The process was so cumbersome that the whole discipline grew lopsided. We developed an extensive body of knowledge about written, formal prose (something very few of us produce), while informal, casual language (something we all produce) was mostly a black box.
The internet changed all that, creating the first-ever corpus of informal language — the immense troves of public casual speech that we all off-gas as we move around on the internet, chattering with our friends.
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Supervised AI isn't (23 August 2023)"
Last week, a US federal judge handed America’s creative workers a huge labor win: Judge Beryl A Howell of the DC Circuit Court upheld a US Copyright Office ruling that works created by “AIs” are not eligible for copyright protection.
This is huge.
Some background: under US law — and under a mountain of international treaties, from the Berne Convention to the TRIPS —copyright is automatically granted to creative works of human authorship “at the moment of fixation in some tangible medium.”
That is: as soon as a human being makes something creative, and records it in some medium (a hard-drive, magnetic tape, paper, film, canvas, etc), that creative thing is immediately copyrighted (the duration of that copyright varies, both by territory and by whether the creator was working on their own or for a corporation).
Continue reading "Everything Made By an AI Is In the Public Domain"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Linkty Dumpty (15 July 2023)"
