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.

Pro business media. Venture Beat and Business Insider, not sources I want to put too much trust in when it comes to AI.

Their position is "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible" is a very bad thing. Much better to "promote US innovation and industrial competitiveness ".

Yes we get it, investors have a massive erection when it comes to AI and anyone that could poo-poo the gravy train is a threat.

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.

So the people at the festival that said they IDF shot at them were spreading disinformation. Who knew...

Except it is Palestine and it belongs to the Palestinians. In 1948 European settlers invaded Palestine and forcible removed the ingenious people. This is all a matter of public record. Little known fact, the state if Israel is an affront to Judaism. Orthodox Jews did not want a state and said a state would go against their religion. For more consult Yisroel Dovid Weiss

LMOL - yeah pull the other one, it has bells on it.

IDF has repeated targeted journalists and medical workers and civilians. https://www.amnesty.org/en/lat...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

So i guess when Chef José Andrés says that IDF had targeted them "systematically, car by car" he was repeating propaganda. Who knew

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

So the Israel blockage of Gaza was Hamas doing, who knew.

Try again jackass. The PLO and later even Hamas, accepted peace deals and each time Israel declined. Israel never seriously supported a two state solution and Benjamin Netanyahu is on record saying he does not support a two state solution.

You are correct, the actual number is much much higher. But please don't upset your pretty little head over such trival things. That a genocide is taking place with the support of the Unites States, please don't give it no neve rmind.

FYI "U.N. and other international agencies say there can be small discrepancies between the final casualty numbers and those reported by the Gaza health ministry straight after attacks, but that they broadly trust them.
We continue to include their data in our reporting and it is clearly sourced," the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement to Reuters." https://www.reuters.com/world/...

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.

So the point you like about going into the office is shooting the shit with people and not getting work done. Got it.

It is hilarious to think that in the age of social media, people feel they are disconnected when working from home. I mean just wow.

Really? Then explain Teledoc or Lyra Health and why employers are pushing the use of those services.