If you were worried about being chased by kill bots, go and watch some videos from drone operators in Ukraine. Robots don't need feet for that job.

This is all moot because it's false that if you use AI you cannot gain copyright on the work. I literally hold a copyright registered with the US copyright office (I registered with them, despite not being a US citizen, because they're precedent-setting), fully disclosing the use of AI in the process, and directly speaking about the matter with a copyright examiner.

What the standard is is that raw, unfiltered outputs are not copyrightable (and even then, there's wiggle room; the argument put forward by the copyright office was "based on their current understanding" (as of several years ago) and presumed very minimal control by the user over the outputs (which was actually already obsolete by the time they put it out, but that's nitpicking)). But the human creative action you take with those outputs can cause the resultant product to be copyrightable. This can be things like sample mixing, mastering, adding vocals, etc, but can also even just be the selection process itself. Yes, assemblage, selection, curation, etc are all potentially copyrightable acts.

In my case, while the samples were (overwhelmingly) AI, the whole project was weeks of work, involving hundreds of generations, track splitting and reassembling, things down to the level of editing individual phonemes (or for example in one part, stripping the vocals and instruments from a sample down to just the residual "other" channel, throwing it into reverse, and then piling on progressively more reverb and volume up to a sudden cutoff to create a tension-point transition). No issues whatoever registering the copyright on it. I'm sure you could do far less and still have a copyrightable work.

I think people need to keep in mind that marketability (aka enjoyability), talent, and effort are three independent axes. You can be talented at one or more aspects of music production, a genuine skill (play a guitar, sing, etc), but put forth either high or low effort, and make good or terrible music, all independently. You can put forth a lot of effort, but you may or may not be talented, and it may or may not be good. You may make a great enjoyable marketable track, but may or may not have notable talents, and may or may not have put in a lot of effort.

In general: I judge how much I want to listen to it by its enjoyability; I attribute how much the author deserves credit / how much it's "art" by how much non-rote effort they put in; and I value the artist's skill based on their demonstrable talent. All of this independent of what specific tools were used. That said, knowledge of certain facts may colour one's enjoyability of a track. If you hate AI and know / suspect it's AI, that'll strongly colour your enjoyability of it. Or if you know the artist is a bad person or whatnot, that again can colour your enjoyability of a track that you'd otherwise enjoy in a vacuum.

One thing I've been thinking recently is being in the AI trade but only with high seniority, not common stock. So if there is a "pop", but the underlying business remains sustainable, the high seniority investors end up with the assets and make a mint when the market returns to balance, whereas the stockholders are the ones who suffer. This could mean a mix of convertible bonds / convertible ETFs, preferred shares, senior corporate debt, physical infrastructure (power suppliers, REITs, etc), BDCs and private credit vehicles, etc. Or possibly even common stock in some of the diversified giants (Google, Microsoft, etc), who - while they'd take quite a temporary hit in a crash - would survive and then buy up all the distressed players.

Oh, shoot, I forgot my "Claude-isms" ;)

I mean, Leopold was literally fired from OpenAI after one year.

(Though I would hardly call Altman "a genius". He's a rather sociopathic VC guy who happened to be in the right place at the right time)

I'm holding out for so many things.

New fabs are finally being built but they take like 3-5 years, so that's not going to solve anything any time soon :P

Situational Awareness is a "hedge" fund that did the opposite of hedging - they made a bunch of leveraged bets that were all linked to each other in typical market movements. It was headed by Leopold Aschenbrenner, a guy just a couple years out of college, whose employment career had been very brief stints at the FTX crypto exchange firm (until it collapsed) and at OpenAI (until he was fired a year later over an alleged information leak). No financial management experience whatsoever. But he was into Effective Altruism, writing AI whitepapers, all that sort of stuff that Silicon Valley tech bros like, and so when he started a hedge fund, $45B was quickly pumped into it.

Nah, this isn't a sort of bubble-popping event. It's a tangential player in the stock market, not some key participant in operations or loans in the AI ecosystem. My main concern: inference IS profitable. Very. But the heavy leverage of the industry is also very real, and can very much still spread like a contagion. And a likely trigger for that is inflation, triggered by trade wars and the ongoing Hormuz and Ukraine conflicts (or worse, new ones added to the list!). One, inflation directly increases their costs, but two, it causes central banks to raise rates. This starves companies of capital (both loans and equity), incl. to refinance existing liabilities, while also hindering income (e.g. new orders get put off or cancelled). It can easily flip a leveraged company into insolvency, and then that can ripple if there's nothing to stop it.

An investment opportunity can be brilliant, a massive world-changing field with huge margins, but still be a terrible investment. One, because the companies you invest in need to survive continuously and not get blipped out by an adverse market event until they have more ability to withstand them. And two, also, because there's a problem where investors don't merely value the whole market as if it has high odds of success, but value the specific player they're invested in with high confidence as if it will dominate said market. Which, obviously, all players combined cannot do.

His opinion seemed clearly explained and well reasoned. As opposed to your comment...

First, searches of their persons and effects does not mean reading and making a copy of their letters and books. It means looking in the trunk and verifying that it is just letters and books.

Second, there were no border agents in 1789. You could walk or swim into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico freely for (statistically) most our nation's history. The first border patrols began in the 1920s to restrict immigration from certain countries. There were laws in the late 1700s regarding import of *cargo*, and that was handled by the folks who ran each individual port, but again, that's not the same thing as searching a passenger's person and making copies of their letters. Those laws applied only to identifying goods that were likely intended for sale, for tax policy/import duty reasons.

This bastardization of border policy to include searching the contents of people's papers and devices is a late 1900s perversion of the Constitution.

So no, pretty much everything you said is wrong.

It still is if you do it yourself and don't have ChatGPT do it for you. But it isn't a useful indication for parents or teachers, because the kids can just have ChatGPT do it for them, and moreover are encouraged to do so by the pressure to get good grades. By making the homework be graded only on adequate participation (which may be per-student) rather than on correctness, you shift the focus back to the homework being a way for students to get ready for the test and make it clear that having an AI do the work will prevent the teacher from knowing how well the student is doing, and will likely result in a lower grade on the test. Once the motivating factor of grades is eliminated and, in fact, reversed, they'll stop doing it, or will use it only to help them understand or to check their work, rather than using it as a crutch to actually do the work.

Any child gifted with high motivation and broad interests wants to practice stuff they already understand less so that they can do other things and learn other things. A child's time is a zero-sum game. The more time they spend doing things that are less useful, the less time they have for doing things that are more useful.

The ones who mindlessly work more problems because they are motivated to get good grades are the ones who aren't doing band, orchestra, chorus, or theater, who aren't going on field trips to learn about the world, who aren't getting the breadth of education that will prepare them for the real world, and will mostly end up in boring (but probably reasonably well-paying) jobs for the rest of their lives. They won't ever be the rockstar in their field, but they probably won't fail horribly. And I guess that's okay, but IMO it's not what we should try to inspire kids to become. The motivation should be to learn for learning's sake, and excess repetition is the opposite of that.

Meh. If that's your experience, then there's no hope for improving anything, because the kids who don't do well are going to pass anyway. This is how we end up with a bunch of graduates who can't actually do anything. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if you're right, then it's critical to fix that at the same time.

They're overlapping, but not the same group. Some smart kids are hard-working and eager to learn. Some are rule-following. Some are both. Some are neither. What I think you meant is that they are not dependent variables.

The effect of this would be that the teacher would quickly intervene and tell the kid that they need to do more of the work, because they don't seem to have fully grasped the concepts. If the kids ignore this, then at the parent-teacher conference after the first six-weeks period, the teacher would encourage the parents to either make their kids do more work or put their kids in an after-school program that would do so.

And if that doesn't work, you can also make the participation points be contingent on whether they are grasping the concepts, where if it is clear that they're not getting it and aren't doing enough work to learn it, you tell them that they won't get participation points unless they do more of the problems.

We should have the tools. I'm not arguing that we should go back to agrarian lifestyles. But somehow we as a society should find a way to not permit wanton waste of resources in the name of cheap, fleeting entertainment.

The issue is that those videos are being created en masse. People would simply not create them in the first place. Making resources so easily available that people waste them without thinking is the reason capitalism has turned our society into a planet destroying machine and called it "quality of life". Nobody's quality of life is improved by the existence of videos of fake cats doing improbable things, yet we've now invested a civilization worth of resources into creating them. It's the broken window fallacy, writ so large that it's unrecognizable.