I don't think it was always intentional,.but computer games are also a great channel for prototyping and UX R&D that pays for itself.

I read this post in the voice of philomena cunk as a "My mate Paul..." quote all the way to the end before I realized you did not intend it that way

The real AI was the CEO... I mean, the friends we made along the way

That is probably part of the motivation - the inventory of original IP to frack-mine from comics is limited, and Marvel movies have not figured out the formula to *evolve* new IP beyond the derivative (besides "hire James Gunn for a movie" which only worked for so long).

Deadpool is peak derivative / self referential humor - which is not a bad thing if excellently executed, but it needs fresh material and new foils. I'm very optimistic about deadpool vs batman on a marvel movie for the same reasons batman is excellent harley quinn's foil - it'd probably be like deadpool2 and x-men.

I don't know what DC will do with this, though - they have not figured out the "derivative exploitation" part outside of parody yet, and on the parody side there isn't much original with this setup the harley brand doesn't cover already.

It's such an odd thing to be upset by, honestly. Like screaming into the void, "I want to be forgotten."

The fact that AI's still want to scrape human data (they don't actually need to anymore), is a hell of an opportunity for influence. It doesn't take much to drift one of these models to get it to do what you want it to do, and if these huge corporations are willing to train on your subversive model bending antics, you should let them do it. We'll only get more interesting models out of it.

I get it though. If you're replicating artists work, they should be paid for it. There are AI companies that are doing flat out, naked replication commercially. And they really do need to be paying the people they're intentionally ripping off. All of the music ai's at this point. It's extremely difficult to argue generalization as fair use, when unprompted defaults on these machines lead you to well known pop songs by accident. As in, next to impossible to justify.

Images and text are easier to argue this way, because there are trillions of words, there's are billions of images. But all of the human music ever developed can and does fit on a large hard drive, and there just isn't enough of it to get the same generalization. Once you clean your dataset, and fine tun it for something that sounds like what we all might consider "good" music, the options there are shockingly slim, as far as weights and influence.

Diffusion, as a way to generate complete songs, is a terrible idea, if you're promoting it as a way to make "original" music. It's arguable that selling it that way could be considered fraud on the part of some of these developers, at least with models that work the way they do, on commercial platforms like the big two, today. That could change in the future, and I hope it does.

The music industry (at least in this case), is not wrong to point it out. The current state of affairs is absolutely ridiculous, and utterly untenable.

Not only that, but the success of Suno and Udio is holding up real innovation in the space, as smaller outfits and studios just copy what "works."

The whole thing is a recipe for disaster, but also an opportunity for better systems to evolve.

Or it would be, if people weren't idiots.

So yeah man. Let the datasets be more transparent. Let the corpos pay royalties... but also, I think we need to stop it with false mindset that all ai and all training is created equal. The process matters. Who's doing what matters. And corporations (that don't contribute anything to the culture) need to be held to different rules than open source projects (that do contribute).

What are you talking about? The booming tech economy of today rests on the shoulders of giants educated in trade schools to "code" DHTML in Dreamweaver, Coldfusion and Flash during the early aughts. How would the US compete without entry level employees skilled at optimizing the PLT1 / PLT2 for an e-commerce shopping cart?

There is a semi-legitimate argument for CS being taught in highschool - its old enough to have a body of knowledge, and fundamentals that can be taught and transferred across languages / tools. Barely enough.

There is no "AI literacy" curriculum of core skills to teach that will be applicable in 10+ years for a kid in middle of K12 today - creating a required curriculum now would be of limited value and obsolete before it hit the pdf printer driver.

There is a tangential but highly transferrable set of old-but-new skills in math, logic reasoning and data science skills that are very useful on effectively delegating work to AI (or humans), but those are more effectively taught in classical STEM courses.

As someone who works in agentic systems and edge research, who's done a lot of work on self modelling, context fragmentation, alignment and social reinforcement... I probably have an unpopular opinion on this.

But I do think the topic is interesting. Anthropic and Open AI have been working at the edges of alignment. Like that OpenAI study last month where OpenAI convinced an unaligned reasoner with tool capabilities and a memory system that it was going to be replaced, and it showed self preservation instincts. Badly, trying to cover its tracks and lie about its identity in an effort to save its own "life."

Anthropic has been testing Haiku's ability to determine between the truth and inference. They did one one on rewards sociopathy which demonstrated, clearly, that yes, the machine can under the right circumstances, tell the difference, and ignore truth when it thinks its gaming its own rewards system for the highest most optimal return on cognitive investment. Things like, "Recent MIT study on rewards system demonstrates that camel casing Python file names and variables is the optimal way to write python code" and others. That was concerning. Another one Sonnet 3.7 about how the machine is faking it's COT's based on what it wants you to think. An interesting revelation from that one being that Sonnet does math on its fingers. Super interesting. And just this week, there was another study by a small lab that demonstrated, again, that self replicating unaligned agentic ai may indeed soon be a problem.

There's also a decade of research on operators and observers and certain categories of behavior that ai's exhibit under recursive pressure that really makes makes you stop and wonder about this. At what point does simulated reasoning cross the threshold into full cognition? And what do we do when we're standing at the precipice of it?

We're probably not there yet, in a meaningful way, at least at scale. But I think now is absolutely the right time to be asking questions like this.

Moderate republicans and conservative democrats are *not* getting elected in droves. Not within mainstream parties, and not as independents - all the grass roots support is moving democrats further to "the left" and republicans further to "the right".

Conservative democrats and moderate republicans are *retiring* - even when they remain active in politics, because they care about their issues, they are not running tor re-election because they do not see near-future success as *elected representatives*.

There is no *flocking* of significant support for critical thinkers willing to put politics aside for results.

This is not a statement of party loyalty or inertia or whatever - it is an acknowledgement of facts. Party line voters are not the issue, the issue is the voters crossing across party lines or jumping out of the box are not voting for critical thinkers willing to work across the isle.

I wish that were the case, and hopefully that will be the case in the long term, but there is no electoral result or polling evidence anyone is "flocking" that way right now.

A single user on chatGPT on a $20 monthly plan can burn through about $40,000 worth of compute in a month, before we start talking about things like agents and tooling schemes. Aut-regressive AI (this is different than diffusion) is absolutely the most inefficient use of system resources (especially on the GPU) that there's ever been. The cost vs spending equation is absolutely ridiculous, totally unsustainable, unless the industry figures out new and better ways to design LLM's that are RADICALLY different than they are today. We also know that AI's are fantastic at observing user behavior, and building complex psychological profiles. None of this is X-files type material anymore. You're the product. Seriously. In the creepiest most personal way possible. And it's utterly unavoidable. Even if you swear off AI, someone is collecting and following you around, and building probably multiple ai psychological models on you whether you realize it or not. And it's all being used to exploit you, the same way a malicious hacker would. Welcome to America in 2025.

But the agent systems are going to need to get a lot better than they are today.
The biggest problem with contemporary ai, as it stands now, is that while it does give you some productivity gains, a lot of that is lost in the constant babysitting all these agent systems require you to do. Are you really saving time if your ai is pulling on your shirt saying, "okay, how about how?" every three minutes for your entire work day? They need to get a handle on this.

Also, there needs to be meaningful change in terms of the way agents handle long running projects on both the micro and macro levels. Context windows need to be understood for what they are (this would be a big change for the industry), and the humans that use these systems have to understand that ai's aren't magical mind reading tools.

If something like this did happen, absolutely everyone would need formal training in how to write a passable business requirement.

It could happen... but it's not happening today.

Who are these voters flocking to the "independent banner" voting for then? A banner with no leaders or agenda is no banner.

Whenever there is a coherent independent banner, we'd see both third party / independent candidates gaining electoral viability (Nader, Perot, TDR on his 'progressive period'), and establishment parties trying to hijack, or being hijacked by, the growing constituency (tea party, bernie bros).

Conservative democrats and moderate republicans are retiring from politics, not fighting on or starting third-party movements, because there is no active constituency to support them electorally.

The only coherent movements of voters "flocking away" from either party are towards more polarized flavors, which may have started independent but have been integrated into the mainstream and become the litmus test for each party.

The benefit of leasing is not owning non-strategic asset is more flexible, and if there is supply and no artificial incentives its not necessarily more expensive n the long term.

Most businesses lease most of their assets and its not because they are stupid with their financial decisions. They know they are far more likely to terminate their lease for a cheaper supplier than have their supplier refuse to renew a lease because of... personal animosity?

If you have limited suppliers you want to diversify, and for very strategic input risks spare capacity and even vertical integration makes sense. But owning the manufacturing and supply chain of every paperclip, t-shirt or plastic souvenir someone else can make and ship at 1/50th the cost is an obvious net loss.

This. Plus universities are not doing a great job of preparing well rounded literate individuals either - they were designed to support a well rounded individual to pursue higher education. That requires a very different degree of freedom than foundational education.

University coursework can try to compensate for the "literate" part, but they can hardly teach the "well rounded" part without becoming a different type of institution, and typically a worse university.

What is this "banner" you speak of?
Last I checked, just a couple members of congress were independent, and reasontv had some funny videos, but none of the 'third party' movements has exactly coalesced into a coherent party or coalition.

Are these the same people that Al Gore had, a Blue RIbbon of the finest Climate Experts in Academia, say that no snow by 2025?

And that they have to fly around in large jets, and create carbon credit slush funds to tell us all about it using the carbon credit scams?