I'm using the Lenovo Y700 and love it. It's an 8 inch tablet, up to date OS, well specced, and minimal bloatware. They introduce a new one each year, so pay attention to the year and the model if you decide to order one.
In a basic sense, this is true
Not really it's just wrong. The one approach that came from Western cultures is the scientific method which is both objective (to the maximum extent any human method has yet achieved) and universal which is why there is no such thing as Chinese, Canadian or Indian etc science there is just science because it is universal. As you alluded to the scientific method has often (including now to some degree) found itself at odds with western culture so I would argue that the scientific method is a product of western culture but not part of it.
Arguing that it is "culturally situated" is nonsense. While science has definitely impacted western culture it has also impacted every culture around the planet and today there are scientists in every continent from a myriad of different cultures. Your culture may impact which questions you want to answer with science but, if you are doing it correctly, it will not affect the knowledge you find and that's why it is both universal and acultural. Indeed, the universal nature of science means it is one of the few things that can bring people of different cultures to work together towards a common goal: to understand the objective reality that we all share.
This won't stop the copyright holders suing but that way it's just money passing hands between big corporations, Sony and Disney vs OpenAI or Microsoft or Google or whoever else.
How's that going to work exactly? How will Sony know whom to sue if they contact me and I tell them I made the video myself? If they do not believe me they will have to sue me to get a name and what happens if the court does not believe me too? Even if I did make the video with some AI company's product, I'd be the one who made money by uploading it not that AI company so why are they the ones who have to pay?
You can't cut the creator out of the legal process so easily: they are the only one who knows whether the video used any AI and they are also the one potentially making money from it. It's clear though that the problem is out-of-control greedy companies: the artists are caught between AI companies who want to trample over copyrights and studios who will dump them the instant a much cheaper, photo-realistic AI actor is practical. At the same time moves to strengthen copyrights against AI will almost certianly be abused by the same studios to come after creators.
I agree that laws should treat humans and AI algorithms differently but for that to work you have to be able to distinguish AI vs human work and so far we can't do that with anything like sufficient reliability..
It's two hours on the train from Sheffield, two and a quarter from Leeds.
Yes, provided that you can afford ~100+ quid for a ticket, live in Leeds near the station and the trains are all running on time. Even living close to Leeds like Harrogate, adds another 1+ hours each way without any other delays making a day trip much less practical especially given the extreme cost. That's also assuming that you are not arriving in London before 10am - if you are arriving before the cut-off the cost is 200+ quid.
So prehaps, if you are living in the middle of Sheffield, the closest city in Yorkshire to London and money is no object it's a day trip but for those not living near a station in a major city and whose budgets are more limited it is most definitely not.
Would you drink warm vomit for $100,000 to donate $1,000,000 to a bunch of blind kids so they can see again?
That sounds less like AI and more like a sponsorship deal with Bud Light.
It takes a lot of existing material from various sources and just shuffles it about to create a sort of randomized mash up of all these sources.
Which is exactly what we do a lot, if not all, the time. We take existing ideas but rearrange them into something that can appear very new. A lot of people at the time that the iPhone launched complained that everything it did had been done before but just not quite in the same way and all in the same device - and yet that was something we typically regard as new, innovative and revolutionary. Arguably, any new musical composition is merely a rearrangement of notes that have all been played before. etc.
That's the problem with inspired vs. copied when it comes to AI and humans. I'd definitely agree that AI perhaps has more of a propensity to copy than a human and definitely it can produce infringing output, just like a human can. However, if nobody can recognize AI output as having been copied then it has done pretty much the same thing as we humans do: produced a new, unique arrangement 'inspired' by previous content. While AI clearly does not have the same thought process as a human, its inputs and (when it works) its outputs are functionally the same and if we start writing laws that differentiate on the process in between that's getting very dangerously close to legislating allowed thought patterns.
That's my big concern with this. The ultimate consequences of the types of legislation that people are now calling for are potentially very damaging if you have a large corporation willing to aggressively pursue law suits. Even limiting any new laws to just AI-generated content won't help since it is impossible to differentiate human and AI content reliably meaning humans could get sued for content they created.
On the topic of AI generated content being theft:
The problem with this is that it makes us all thieves. All our work, regardless of field, is based and built on the work of those who came before us. As Newton himself said back in 17th century "if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Three and a half centuries later we've got here by doing a lot of shoulder standing and never paying royalties of everything we go on to create to those who taught and inspired us.
I'd be very, very leery of expanding IP rights to allow this. I'm sure the artists calling for this are not planning to abuse it but we all know by know that standing in the wings are corporations who will that such rights and clobber us all with them.
People need to travel from Geneva to Paris. People don't need to fuck around with clocks arbitrarily twice a year.
People do not _need_ to do either. They want to do both. You may not want to change the clocks and that's fine but that's a personal preference and has literally nothing to do with the story. It is appallingly bad journalism to use a story you are writing as a vehicle to air your personal views. As for 'bad' the 'cost' in this case is almost certianly nothing: the algorithm that identifies and filters the noise from traffic will simply identify an filter the noise an hour later. Indeed, it is potentially a positive since it helps to confirm that the source of the noise is traffic.
The trouble with a lot of self-made men is that they worship their creator.
