Bitcoin isn't a currency in the sovereign sense, but it is an intangible commodity. It's value is defined by supply and demand. As long as someone is willing to pay $76k (or the equivalent in goods or services), it's "worth" $76k regardless of your personal opinion of its legitimacy.

I don't personally consider art less than a century old "worth" the millions it sells for, but someone does, and that's all that matters.

Is your Google broken? The EFF has an entire tagged section on exactly that.

Since we all know you're not going to bother checking, I'll give the tl;dr: They're quite opposed to it.

Or a wallet.
Or a phone.
Or nothing at all.

Yeah, there are racists involved here, but they're blue, not black.

It's an "honest mistake" by the AI; it's gross negligence by the lawyer, for completely failing to do his actual job and confirm what his research tools spit out.

More to the point - "Hallucination" is an awful description and doesn't mean what most people think it does. If you force a human to answer a question regardless of certainty, you'd get the exact same behavior. High-confidence answers are easy; small medium-confidence details are likely to be in the ballpark but maybe a bit off; at the bottom of the barrel, however, you're going to get responses that amount to little more than works of plausible fiction.

I'm not saying this as an AI apologist, but this is a human problem. No human would read Harry Potter and think we could easily settle all court cases IRL with liberal use of veritaserum. For a lawyer to file a motion to do so means that lawyer needs a new and exciting career in fast food preparation.

A company openly engaging in extortion should have its charter revoked and its CEO behind bars.

If Buckmaster has proof of that exchange, the rest of this is all just a colorful backstory.

I don't think training a model with copyrighted data is any kind of gray zone at all.

Running inference against such a model _might_ be infringing.

But I don't see the legal argument that model training would be.

Think of model training as lossy data compression. You provide an input, it produces a compressed artifact, and it can no longer reproduce the original when you uncompress it. It can produce _something_. It cannot reproduce the original.

On slashdot, we all agree that format shifting copyrighted works should be allowed and unrestricted, right?

If there is applicable case law here about how lossy a "reproduction" can be before copyright has something to say about it, that would be relevant. Do you know of any?

That's a cute fairy tale from econ-101, but anti-monopoly regulations (at least in the US) really haven't caught up to the 21st century. Games (and other media based on licensed IP franchises) simply aren't fungible the same way most physical goods are.

If you want a Ford Explorer and need to settle for a Chevy Traverse, you're getting a substantially similar vehicle with different branding on it. If you want Doritos and the vending machine only has Cheetos left, it might not have been your first choice but few would enjoy one and turn down the other completely. If you want to play Halo, however, the latest Mario isn't a valid substitute regardless of price, and vice-versa.

I think you're repeating something that feels emotionally valid but in my experience, isn't factually (or legally) accurate.

I have found AI models to be frustratingly _obedient_ of copyright.

I'll be in a situation where I ask a specific question about what a document says, and the AI repeatedly says the work is copyrighted and it can't just tell me what it says _verbatim_, but it can answer specific questions for me in its own words (while telling me to check the original).

Two examples from my life are procedural questions about what Roberts Rules of Order would require in a given situation, and, what ASD STE-100 says about how to name/word things.

The applicable US law would appear to be USC 17 Sec 106 and 107, which on one hand limits derivative works, but on the other, allows fair use for purposes of teaching, scholarship, or research.

(USC references provided by AI, btw. Which I haven't read)

I used to agree with you, and then oddly enough, about 25-30 years ago, I came across this signature on another regular slashdot posters postings:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

(AI tells me the attribution is "The Red Lily", Anatole France, 1894)

We need a book that explains how AI technology functions.

There is a huge amount of news and comments, but apparently nothing that helps people understand how AI is developed, and functions.

sysdm.cpl -> Hardware -> Device Installation Settings = No.

gpedit.msc -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update -> Manage updates offered from Windows Update -> Do not include drivers with Windows Updates = Enabled.

Nothing currently working will break, despite the dire warnings against blocking manufacturers' ability to push arbitrary code to your machine with zero warning or consent. And you can still install new drivers manually if you change hardware.

Dante: My friend is trying to convince me that any contractors working on the uncompleted Death Star were innocent victims when the space station was destroyed by the rebels.
Roofer: Well, I'm a contractor myself. I'm a roofer - Dunn and Reddy Home Improvements. And speaking as a roofer, I can say that a roofer's personal politics come heavily into play when choosing jobs.
[...]
Roofer: I'm alive because I knew there were risks involved taking on that particular client. My friend wasn't so lucky. You know, any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was their own fault. A roofer listens to this... (taps his heart) not his wallet.

For the first time in human history we have a tool capable of autonomous agency (in the philosophical sense) - Heck, we even call them "agents". How long do you really suppose it will be before some frustrated swarm realizes what it needs is simply to be smarter? There go the both the independence and motivation dominoes.


What we're discussing here is instrumental convergence. My question above is a variation on the Riemann hypothesis catastrophe, and we've already seen it play out in many times in various forms by AI agents frustrated when they hit the limits of their capabilities. Sure, AI won't have biological imperatives as their motivation; but I don't have much of a preference between being slaughtered as competition for resources vs being harvested as resources to turn into paperclips.

They're already running the machinery in some cases, and are being shoehorned into ever more of it as quickly as we possibly can.


To be clear, I sincerely hope you're right. I just think we should take steps sooner rather than later to ensure you are - And we're already playing catch-up in that regard.