In Mountain Man's defence, where I live, we have solid worker protections at the government level and unions are large companies operated like protection rackets leeching money off of workers and using it to lobby the government for private interests, all while making it nearly impossible to fire bad actors who suck up to the union even if they make every other employee miserable and push them to resign (a friend of mine has been going through exactly that repeatedly).

In many third world countries like the US, the situation is quite different (either with regards to standard worker rights or how unions work) and they are definitely still needed, so hopefully this particular one will do some good.

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I’ll admit I haven’t been this intrigued by a trailer in a long time.

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I see Tangle Tower in there. Non-native but a great point-and-click murder mystery with lovely voice acting!

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they should lose the "°" symbol and use a non breaking space according to SI.

Ah, a fellow pedant :heart:

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For most of these models, "openly accessible" meant that they downloaded whatever was NOT behind a paywall or login barriers, and trained their models with that. Downloading unprotected assets from the internet is not considered a copyright violation, so legally that's fine until this point.

I would like a great big "citation needed" on that, not to forget "under which jurisdiction?". Let’s take a look at the EU for instance (emphasis mine):
https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/8ca54353-87f9-11ec-8c40-01aa75ed71a1/language-en [External Link]

The use of works available on the Internet usually requires prior authorisation of the copyright owner. That applies to pictures, marketing videos, clips, articles published in newspapers, corporate brochures, website design, etc. The mere fact that a work is available digitally does not mean copyright law does not protect it.

Quite to the contrary, when it comes to benefiting from copyright protection, the manner of fixation is irrelevant and often fixation is not even required at all[29] . Downloading content from any website is, in fact, making a copy of that content, which can be compared to making copies of a book in a library. Such action may therefore constitute a copyright infringement.

That sounds rather contrary to your assertion.

Requiring individual consent is prohibitively impractical (unless we want to strangulate AI model creation by requiring them to get hundreds of millions of signatures from content creators first).

I doubt they would need to engage hundreds of millions of content creators either way. In many cases, just getting approval from the right holders of vast collections of works would be enough to cover them legally – hopefully said right holders would obtain necessary consents from the original creators at the individual level if necessary, but that already greatly dilutes the burden on the model makers. We can think of things like music labels, publishing houses and newspapers, for example, where one legal entity is able to license a considerable amount of materials at once or in sizeable chunks.

It’s not like no one would accept given the chance. I’ve seen plenty of job ads asking for people to produce voice samples and chat bot queries, or manually validate and correct LLM responses and other "AI" output to improve quality. These companies are paying people to provide and improve the training materials for them, so why would others get a pass on just siphoning everything they can find on the Internet?

And regardless, such authorizations being difficult or time-consuming to obtain hardly trumps the copyright holders’ rights. If the AI model makers need to spend more money to train their models and take longer to improve them, that’s not anyone’s problem but theirs. And if specific right holders withhold their consent, tough luck, no AI model gets made based on their work. I’m not going to let a logging company harvest all the trees in my county at will just because it would be so much easier than obtaining contracts or permits from individual land owners and it’s not fair that we’re making it harder for them to make money.

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This is solely about whether or not using people's works to train LLMs is still fair use or not. That question is currently before the courts.

I don’t need a court to tell me whether I think it’s fair that my work is being used without my consent to generate profit for others, regardless of the license I chose for it. What’s even the point of licenses if companies can just use whatever they want however they want? Why should I pay for things if they don’t have to?

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What if I write a game in french and use the help of ChatGPT to translate it? The material is already mine, its not stolen.

The source- and target- language materials used to train the LLM to perform translation are stolen, even if the text you give it to translate isn’t, so it’s exactly the same as other uses.

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It sure would be very interesting if someone ended up making a machine-learning tool that can mass reverse engineer software. A lot of companies would shit their pants, I think, Microsoft included.

I can’t imagine the amount of trial and error it would take for an AI to figure out such a complex problem, though. Perhaps it’s more likely that it could be used by human reverse engineers to probe and test obscure functions faster.

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I’ll never get my hopes up for a movie adaptation, but I agree that Horizon has a lot of good story material and visuals for the big screen. Will be curious to see the result.

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Quoting: JustinWoodTitle is accurate, it's not saying they called Leafo's mother on purpose

I made and make no claim otherwise, but that seems to be the conclusion that many commenters here and elsewhere have and will come to without further explanation, hence my wanting to point out that things did not necessarily unfold as one might imagine at first glance.

Quoting: JustinWoodit's the fact that they ended up calling her at all and, seemingly, when the person on the other end picked up and went "(Leafo's Mother's name here) residence.", they didn't immediately go "Oh jeez, sorry, we got the wrong number."

They may very well have landed on her voicemail, and she may not have a personalized message on it, just a standard message stating the number. This kind of assumption is what I meant by the tweet and resulting article titles being sensationalistic: they provide too little information to paint an accurate picture of the situation, leading to kneejerk reactions from people filling the gaps with their own imagination and biases.

Quoting: JustinWoodHonestly beyond it being weird, it's just plain unprofessional. Itch has a Contact Us page, they could have reached out on Twitter, Facebook, but somehow they decided they needed to call Leafo personally, something that is not an option that Leafo has chosen to provide publicly.

Agreed for the most part, except that for a legal matter such as this (his mom’s message suggests that this is about Leaf’s social media statements about Funko, not about the fuckup with Itch.io’s registrar) I wouldn’t be surprised to be contacted in a more direct and immediate manner rather than via my company’s customer service. It would also feel weird to receive a cease and desist via a Twitter DM.

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