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Comment Re:Who you are; Something you know (Score 1) 131

The classic "username" and "password" combo provides two pieces of information in order to verify identify: who you are, and something you know.

Actually, it doesn't. Nothing in the username field has anything to do with identity. I can enter whatever I want there, or where it is an e-mail I can just enter whatever I want followed by @gmail.com once I've registered that as my e-mail account.

These are not two differen things. There's no actual difference between "username+password" and "password1+password2".

but using them to replace your password seems like a bad idea.

Only because passwords are such a stupid idea.

I want my biometric devices to have a distress function. Like "if I try to log in with THIS finger, lock the device, encrypt the drive, flush all secrets and require a password to unlock it".

Comment Re: Cue all the people acting shocked about this.. (Score 1) 41

Based on the Office's understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output.[28] For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare's style.[29] But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text.[30]

Compare with my summary:

" their argument was that because the person doesn't control the exact details of the composition of the work"

I'll repeat: I accurately summed up their argument. You did not.

Comment Re:Oppose any new laws (Score 1) 51

This is why we need to pass a SIMPLE amendment:
We, the Citizens of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, shall have the right to amend the constitution directly, by having a simple majority of voters of three fourths of the states OR two thirds of voters in two thirds of the states, within a 10 year period of the first state passing the amendment.

A simple amendment like that would allow us to fix a large number of issues that CONgress will not do. Why will they not do it? Because they are controlled by 2 horribly corrupt parties that are controlled by rich ppl, businesses, and even foreign governments. We need to take back our government.

Comment Re:mostly fascist (Score 1) 51

????
WTF does your second url have to do with ANY of this? 2 criminals were illegally stopped, but not due to any information from above.

Fusion centers? Are you talking about information moving from local LEOs up to the FBI and DNI??
Personally, I would prefer that information to go to DNI et. al, and not FBI, but that is for judges to decide. Even if the information flows downwards, I am good with that, AS LONG as it was legally obtained and is applicable to the situation. For example, NSA did NOT tap into to Trump's calls. OTOH, they DO tap various Russian calls, of which obviously a number of trump calls BEFORE he made president was done (this is why NSA objected to giving him, his family, and certain members of his admin access to intel, but esp. to Russian intel). If NSA had learned that Trump was getting marching orders from putin to sell fentanyl on the street, that should not be allowed to be sent down. Why not? Because this is not about terrorism/spying, it is about a criminal charge, which is where NSA is NOT concerned. However, I do not know if such information IS flowing downwards. I would hope not.

Comment Re:mostly fascist (Score 1) 51

So, you do not think that NSA, DIA, etc should have the ability to know as much about Americans as China and Russia legally do?
Why is that? If you had paid attention to Snowden the ILLEGAL spying that was going on, was NOT from NSA iteself, but from individuals in there using gear that was only meant to go after terrorists, spies, etc. but instead using it on their own families/friends.

And there is a lot less sharing of information in the 5Is than you realize. To ask one of the others means that you generally have to show some sort of reason for it. Not a warrant, but certainly not the wild sharing that you seem to think is going on.

Comment Re:AI Incest (Score 2, Interesting) 41

Yes, "you've been told" that by people who have no clue what they're talking about. Meanwhile, models just keep getting better and better. AI images have been out for years now. There's tons on the net.

First off, old datasets don't just disappear. So the *very worst case* is that you just keep developing your new models on pre-AI datasets.

Secondly, there is human selection on things that get posted. If humans don't like the look of something, they don't post it. In many regards, an AI image is replacing what would have been a much crapper alternative choice.

Third, dataset gatherers don't just blindly use a dump of the internet. If there's a place that tends to be a source of crappy images, they'll just exclude or downrate it.

Fourth, images are scored with aesthetic gradients before they're used. That is, humans train models to assess how much they like images, and then those models look at all the images in the dataset and rate them. Once again, crappy images are excluded / downrated.

Fifth, trainers do comparative training and look at image loss rates, and an automatically exclude problematic ones. For example, if you have a thousand images labeled "watermelon" but one is actually a zebra, the zebra will have an anomalous loss spike that warrants more attention (either from humans or in an automated manner). Loss rates can also be compared between data +sources+ - whole websites or even whole datasets - and whatever is working best gets used.

Sixth, trainers also do direct blind human comparisons for evaluation.

This notion that AIs are just going to get worse and worse because of training on AI images is just ignorant. And demonstrably false.

Comment Re:Cue all the people acting shocked about this... (Score 4, Interesting) 41

As for why I think the ruling was bad: their argument was that because the person doesn't control the exact details of the composition of the work, than the basic work (before postprocessing or selection) can't be copyrighted. But that exact same thing applies to photography, outside of studio conditions. Ansel Adams wasn't out there going, "Okay, put a 20 meter oak over there, a 50 meter spruce over there, shape that mountain ridge a bit steeper, put a cliff on that side, cover the whole thing with snow... now add a rainbow to the sky... okay, cue the geese!" He was searching the search space for something to match a general vision - or just taking advantage of happenstance findings. And sure, a photographer has many options at their hands in terms of their camera and its settings, but if you think that's a lot, try messing around with AUTOMATIC1111 with all of its plugins some time.

The winner of Nature Photographer of the year in 2022 was Dmitry Kokh, with "House of Bears". He was stranded on a remote Russian archipelago and discovered that polar bears had moved into an abandoned weather station, and took photos of them. He didn't even plan to be there then. He certainly didn't plan on having polar bears in an abandoned weather station, and he CERTAINLY wasn't telling the bears where to stand and how to pose. Yet his work is a classic example of what the copyright office thinks should be a copyrightable work.

And the very notion that people don't control the layout with AI art is itself flawed. It was an obsolete notion even when they made their ruling - we already had img2img, instructpix2pix and controlnet. The author CAN control the layout, down to whatever level of intricate detail they choose. Unlike, say, a nature photographer. And modern models give increasing levels of control even with the prompt itself - with SD3 (unlike SD1/2 or SC) - you can do things like "A red sphere on a blue cube to the left of a green cone" . We're heading to - if not there already - where you could write a veritable short story's worth of detail to describe a scene.

I find it just plain silly that Person A could grab their cell phone and spend 2 seconds snapping a photo of whatever happens to be out their window, and that's copyrightable, but a person who spends hours searching through the latent space - let alone with ControlNet guidance (controlnet inputs can be veritable works of art in their own right) - isn't given the same credit for the amount of creative effort put into the work.

I think, rather, it's very simple: the human creative effort should be judged not on the output of the work (the work is just a transformation of the inputs), but the amount of creative effort they put into said inputs. Not just on the backend side - selection, postprocessing, etc - but on the frontend side as well. If a person just writes "a fluffy dog" and takes the first pic that comes up, obviously, that's not sufficient creative endeavour. But if a person spends hours on the frontend in order to get the sort of image they want, why shouldn't that frontend work count? Seems dumb to me.

Comment Cue all the people acting shocked about this... (Score 4, Informative) 41

... when the original ruling itself plainly said that though the generated content itself isn't copyrightable, human creative action such as postprocessing or selection can render it copyrightable.

I still think the basic ruling was bad for a number of reasons, and it'll increasingly come under stress in the coming years. But there is zero shock to this copyright here. The copyright office basically invited people to do this.

Comment Re:Wow! (Score 3, Insightful) 23

Here in the USA, the idea of the government actually doing anything for citizens is viewed by Republicans as welfare and something bad. Investing in citizens is against what they believe in, while giving money away to the wealthy and international corporations that ship jobs out of the USA to other countries is perfectly worthy of the government giving them tax breaks.

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