Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:How far back do the records exist? (Score 1) 49

Except:
A) we are talking about sea temps 10m below the surface across a global data set. Some Enlightenment polymaths taking readings with their home made thermometers in Europe wouldn't impact that data set at all.
B) "guestimates" would be hilarious to include in a conclusion being reached based on HUNDREDTHS of a degree (0.10 vs 0.09)

My supposition would be this is modem data only, eg since the 1990s MAYBE.

Comment Re:I bet he does it for 2 reasons (Score 1) 112

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.

Comment Re:I bet he does it for 2 reasons (Score 1) 112

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.

Comment Re:Not a pop yet (Score 1) 44

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.

Comment Re:Not a pop yet (Score 3, Informative) 44

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.

Comment Re:Intellectual sharecropping (Score 1) 112

Almost everybody has everything they need to make hamburgers at home. By that logic, McDonald's shouldn't exist.

Except time and willpower. However, the McDonald's analogy does hold up -- nobody is ever going to get rich flipping burgers at McDonald's, precisely because it requires so little skill to do that job, making McDonald's workers completely fungible. Since anyone can man a grill, no one is going to command a salary much more than what a high schooler will agree to do it for.

Comment Intellectual sharecropping (Score 1) 112

The economic problem with having an AI produce music for you is, you never get the opportunity to learn how to produce it for yourself. At the end of the day, you're paying them $200/month for the privilege of remaining unskilled, and you're competing against everyone else who knows how to enter "write a catchy song for me" into a prompt box. You can't make money that way, because the moment you do, the AI companies (who own all of the talent and all of the production machinery) can simply appropriate your income stream for themselves.

It's the difference playing Guitar Hero and taking guitar lessons -- both let you feel like you're a competent musician, but only the latter will ever get you a career as a musician.

Submission + - How Big Tech Captured American Schools

theodp writes: In How Big Tech Captured American Schools (alt source), an adapted excerpt of the forthcoming book Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools, the New York Times' Natasha Singer begins: "Many parents would likely object if, say, Exxon Mobil wrote their children’s environmental science curriculum. Or if Purdue Pharma trained their children’s biology teachers. Yet, over the last decade, schools have often embraced the technology industry in similar ways with few questions asked. Industry-sponsored teacher training is just one technique that Big Tech companies use to shape schools and promote their worldviews to students. In interviewing more than 100 education and tech industry figures for my book, and reviewing hundreds of school, government and corporate documents, it became clear that a handful of giants have used their money, their might and their mammoth platforms to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain."

"Consumer tech giants provide the essential scaffolding that schools run on. That means laptops and tablets; operating systems and device-tracking software; the apps students use to write essays and analyze data; the messaging platforms that connect students and teachers; and more. Some of these companies, including Google, Microsoft and Apple, have also used their status as classroom tech providers as a springboard to influence how and what schoolchildren learn."

"This story matters whether you want schools to center tech skills or are agnostic, because the recent learn-to-code craze and the growing push for A.I. in schools are not just about learning. Those trends are part of a larger exercise of Silicon Valley power. The public education system, hungry for resources to improve opportunities for students, has become an avenue for multitrillion-dollar companies to enact their agendas."

"This development taps into fundamental questions about education that Americans have been arguing over for more than a century. What is the purpose of public schooling? Is it to raise critical, independent thinkers? Train students in the latest career skills? Help young people discover their passions? Serve the needs of the prevailing industry or emerging ones? Create knowledgeable and active participants in a democracy? Or all of the above?"

In an accompanying LinkedIn post, Singer adds: "Every few years, Silicon Valley has urged American public schools to quickly adopt the latest technology or teach the latest tech subject: Big Data analytics; laptops for every child; algorithm-driven math and reading apps; computer programming; virtual reality. And each time the urgent arguments sounded remarkably similar: if schools just adopted the latest tech tool, or taught the latest tech subject, it would democratize learning for every child and equip students with valuable career skills. The campaign to expand student access to computer science and other efforts had good intentions. But today we know some of those classroom tech drives did not exactly pan out as advertised. Now some of the same companies that urged schools to provide laptops and coding lessons are employing similar arguments to urge schools to quickly adopt A.I. tools. I've spent years covering Chromebooks and student chatbot use. And I'm troubled by our collective amnesia around school tech."

Comment Re: I think it's missing some nuance (Score 1) 90

Certainly! Your point raises a crucial, multifaceted issue that merits deeper examination. It's not just about detection accuracy, it's about the evolving interplay between human intention and algorithmic assistance — a dynamic that resists simple binary classification.

When we delve into the mechanics of modern AI tools, it becomes evident that the boundary between "correction" and "generation" is increasingly porous. Consider the following nuances:

Gradual authorship spectra: Text exists on a continuum — from fully human-crafted prose, to human writing with AI-suggested punctuation, to passages where the AI has restructured entire paragraphs. Detection tools, however, often operate on categorical assumptions that fail to capture this complexity.

The feedback loop phenomenon: Furthermore, as writers internalize AI-suggested patterns — Oxford commas, em dashes, and certain syntactic rhythms — their "human" baseline shifts. This creates a fascinating, almost paradoxical scenario: the more one learns from AI feedback, the more one's unassisted writing may trigger detection algorithms.

Contextual markers vs. stylistic choices: Notably, certain signals — like the increased use of "delve," "testament," or negative parallelism — may reflect genuine stylistic evolution rather than automated generation. It's a testament to how AI influences language culture broadly, not just individual documents.

In conclusion, the challenge you identify is not merely technical but philosophical — forcing us to reconsider what we mean by "authentic" voice in an era of human-AI collaboration. The question, ultimately, is not whether a tool assisted in the writing, but whether the ideas, arguments, and intellectual labor remain genuinely human.

I hope proves helpful! Please let me know if you would like to delve deeper into any specific aspect of these findings, or if you would like me to explore the broader implications for content strategy.

Slashdot Top Deals

No extensible language will be universal. -- T. Cheatham

Working...