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.

... 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.

The real champagne celebration is still days away, and who will be celebrating remains to be seen.

Trump receives a huge number of additional bonus shares if the stock's price stays above $17.50 for 20 trading days, and lesser amounts at $15.00 and $12.50 thresholds.

I believe were at 14 or 15 trading days so far, though which day officially counts as the start isn't clear (at least to me).

Yes and no.
Your example of an adult with a child will indeed not be respected because it is illegal in most countries.
But between adults? Those generally will, even same sex marriages in most countries.

Like Japan does not have same-sex marriages (yet), but as far as I know they will respect the legal binding of me and my spouse would we be there as tourists.
Like for visit rights in hospitals, making the big decisions, etc.
By default countries are indeed by default not required to apply them, but at the moment you start signing treaties as a country, you are.

Here we go again with this.

NVidia shipped 100k AI GPUs last year, which - if run nonstop - would consume 7,4 TWh. Crypto consumes over 100 TWh per year, and the world as a whole consumes just under 25000 TWh per year.

AI consumption of power is a pittiance. To get these huge numbers, they have to assume long-term extreme exponential scaling. But you can make anything give insane numbers with an assumption like that.

I simply don't buy the assumption. Not even assuming an AI bust - even assuming that AI keeps hugely growing, and that nobody rests on their laurels but rather keeps training newer and better foundations - the simple fact is that there's far too much progress being made towards vastly more efficient architectures at every level - model structure, neuron structure, training methodologies, and hardware. . Not like "50% better", but like "orders of magnitude better". I just don't buy these notions of infinite exponential growth.

They don't have to no.
But it would be pretty bad for diplomatic relations if you as country don't respect the marriage status of another country.
And it would also pretty bad for your tourist income ;)

Same, the only reason why we bothered to get married (same-sex couple) was to get stuff like inheritance fixed.
Sure it is possible on other ways but that would be more expensive and and more effort then to marry.

Everyone (including Slashdot) is presenting the study wrong. It's forecasting that world incomes would drop by nearly a fifth relative to what they would have otherwise been, not relative to the present.

You mean that religions took over a habbit of 2 people joining.
Marriage is a lot older then the big religions

I feel sorry for your wife to have a husband with such backwards idea's

"but you have a biological drive to have children"

Talk for yourself. I'm a female and have 0 desire to have children.

The reason why both parents are working so much is because The Netherlands is so dam expensive to live in.
Most couples need 2 working adults to just pay the bills.
Marriage has nothing to do with it.

It's not just a question of whether it's justifiable. It's just simply nonsense to think that they can enforce this. Anyone can run Stable Diffusion on their computer. There's a virtually limitless number of models finetuned to make all kinds of porn. It's IMHO extremely annoying all the porn flooding the model sites; I think like 3/4ths of the people using these tools are guys making wank material. Even models that aren't tuned specifically for porn, rarely does anyone (except the foundation model developers, like StabilityAI) specifically try to *prevent* it.

The TL/DR is: if you think stopping pirated music was hard, well, *good luck* stopping people from generating porn on their computers. You might as well pass a law declaring it illegal to draw porn.

Light exposure, depth, degree of exposure, isolated from others or clustered... many factors can affect survivability.

To be fair, there have been times where Earth's temperature changed relatively rapidly.

On the other hand... those times tended not to work out very well for life :

Our current experiment with mass greenhouse gas emissions affecting the climate, Earth itself has kinda done it before, at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary. The associated Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) left the world such an altered place that we refer to it as a different era (the Eocene). The oceans took the brunt of the hit. Except the differences we have vs. the PETM are *not* to our favour:

  * The arctic was ice-free going into the PETM; ours is not. The presence of ice creates an amplifying feedback process, where the more ice that melts, the more sunlight gets absorbed, creating more heat to melt more ice.

  * We're releasing our carbon an order of magnitude faster (though our methane emissions are similar)

The PETM caused a 5-8C rise over 6000 years, but we're speed-running it, so it's really our best case. The worst case is the K-Pg extinction event

Only the worst excursions in history tend to result in large parts of the earth becoming relative sterile. But they all lead to mass disruptions in ecosystems and waves of global or at least local extinction (but new speciation of the survivors who take their place). Indeed, we probably owe our existence to the PETM - primates diversified and radiated after it. But that's little solace to species that didn't make it. Like, for example, dinoflagellates flourished during the PETM. But do you really want to replace reefs with red tide?

Also, it's actually 1-3 years. The Great Barrier reef underwent mass bleaching events in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, and now in 2024.