riskable

You bring up a great point! When someone does that: Painting a replica and passing it off as their own, what law have they violated? They have committed fraud. That's a counterfeit.

Is making a counterfeit stealing? No! It's counterfeitting. That is it's own category of law.

It's also a violation of the owner's copyright but let's talk about that too: If I pay an artist to copy someone's work, who is the copyright violator? Me, or the artist that painted it? Neither! It's a trick question, because copyright law only comes into force when something is distributed. As long as those works never get distributed/viewed to/by the public, it's neither here nor there.

The way AI works is the same as if you took a book you purchased, threw it in a blender, then started pasting chunks of words out of it in a ransom note.

Woah! Piracy is not considered stealing. The MPAA and RIAA made that argument over and over and over again in the 90s and early 2000s and they lost. Thank the gods!

You would download a car!

If piracy was stealing, we'd all be waiting for our chance to watch TV shows in a queue of thousands.

Copyright violations are not theft. They never were and they never will be. Because no one is deprived of anything when something is copied. In theory, there could've been a lost sale as a result but study after study has shown that piracy actually improves sales of copyrighted works.

When an AI is trained on images that YOU—the artist—posted to the public Internet for the world to see it will either increment or decrement a floating point value by like 0.01. That's it! That's all it does.

How can that be considered "stealing"‽ It's absurd.

That's not "upscaling". That's having the AI color it in for you. Like a comic artist who has a colorer (person that literally does that).

Upscaling just makes the image bigger (resolution-wise). It uses the same exact technology as regular AI image generation though 🤷

There's degrees to everything. AI haters are at the point where they're arguing with digital artists over what counts as art and it's getting insane.

Don't say, "stolen". It's the wrong word. "Copied" is closer but really, "trained an AI model with images freely available on the Internet" is more accurate but doesn't sound sinister.

When you steal something, the original owner doesn't have it anymore. AIs aren't stealing anything. They're sort of copying things but again, not really. At the heart of every AI LLM or image model is a random number generator. They aren't really capable of copying things exactly unless the source material somehow gets a ridiculously high "score" when training. Such as a really popular book that gets quoted in a million places on the Internet and in other literature (and news articles, magazines, etc... anything that was used to train the AI).

Someone figured out that there's so much Harry Potter quotes and copies in OpenAI's training set that you could trick it into outputting something like 70% of the first book, one very long and specific prompt at a time (thousand of times). That's because of how the scoring works, not because of any sort of malicious intent to violate copyright on the part of OpenAI.

Nobody's stuff is being stolen.

I don't know about the carbon emissions, the water thing in the article is extremely misleading. It claims that AI is using up more water than the entire yearly consumption of bottled water. The water usage estimates include the water used to cool the power plants generating the power (running the data center).

The last study on this said that the actual usage of water in the data centers is 12% of the total water usage estimate. Data centers don't normally use that much water. It would be like Niagra Falls pouring water over every data center.

Simple reality check: If you look at the cooling system outside any given data center—if they're using as much water as d article suggests—they'd be emitting a massive cloud of water, 24/7. It would be so much, they'd need a cooling tower on par with a nuclear power station.

So what's with the statistic? If you look at any given power plant on Google Maps you'll see cooling ponds all around it. That's the water they're talking about. It's part of the build of the power plant. It's not using potable water that would be going into people's houses.

Having said that, 12% of the water usage is potable water—in the worst-case data center/power plant matchup scenario. Where you have an older data center that doesn't use modern closed loop cooling systems that don't lose as much water to evaporation. I don't know what the statistic is, but I can sure you it's a lot better than 12%. A wild guess would be 4-6%.

Background: I was a security consultant for many years and traveled all over the US going into many data centers (sometimes, by breaking in! Hah). Inside, they're loud AF (think: standing next to a jet engine) and outside they'll have some big ass cooling units that are also kinda loud but not as loud as some of these articles make them out to be.

That was about 7 years ago but I doubt much has changed since then. I guarantee that those data centers are still being used and have been renovated to support AI-style hardware. The power from the utility was just increased and more cooling units were added. I seriously doubt they did much more than that.

From what I've read about the new "giga scale" data centers, they're much more efficient (and quieter... Outside). Those are the ones we want. If we replaced all the old stuff with new stuff, the statistics in articles like this would drop by and order of magnitude (just a guess).

Probably an anti-counterfeit watermark.

This seems more like a story about global warming killing jobs than anything else.

Of course, Trump's obscenely pro-oil stance is very Leopards Eating Faces.

We need oil to be more expensive but energy to be cheaper. Then more energy-intensive but more environmentally friendly alternatives can be used instead of (traditional) plastic.

Example: If energy was basically unlimited and free, suddenly the weight of glass as a product container doesn't matter so much anymore. Same for steel and weirder things like products made out of thick, industrially-pressed fungus (which is a real thing, haha).

Well they didn't cause an accident which is better than many drivers 🤷

Atoms lettuce break the iceberg.

Think about all the absolutely terrible writing that's out there. Writing that people are reading because they feel like they've read everything else in their ~~fetish~~ genre already.

You can do better than that! Surely!

It's so bad that people are resorting to using AI to write (awful) stories for them. These stories don't make any sense yet people read them anyway. Why? Because they ran out of the other stuff they like in their little ~~fetish~~ genre.

Tell your story! I'm positive someone will be interested in it.

I recently wrote a novel for a writing contest: https://www.honeyfeed.fm/novels/22194

Many people thought it was funny and entertaining but most stopped reading after the second or third chapter. The people that made it all the way to the end expressed an attitude like, "Finally! A story that's actually unique!" And that's exactly why I wrote it! Because I'm sick of "the same old shit" (in the isekai genre) 🤣

Write your story for you and be satisfied 👍

Better headline: Swiss cheese security at dairy farm results in hackers trying to milk them for all they're worth.