The language model isn’t teaching anything it is changing the wording of something and spitting it back out. And in some cases, not changing the wording at all, just spitting the information back out, without paying the copyright source.

You could honestly say the same about most “teaching” that a student without a real comprehension of the subject does for another student. But ultimately, that’s beside the point. Because changing the wording, structure, and presentation is all that is necessary to avoid copyright violation. You cannot copyright the information. Only a specific expression of it.

There’s no special exception for AI here. That’s how copyright works for you, me, the student, and the AI. And if you’re hoping that copyright is going to save you from the outcomes you’re worried about, it won’t.

Makes sense to me. Search indices tend to store large amounts of copyrighted material yet they don’t violate copyright. What matters is whether or not you’re redistributing illegal copies of the material.

If I understand correctly they are ruling you can by a book once, and redistribute the information to as many people you want without consequences. Aka 1 student should be able to buy a textbook and redistribute it to all other students for free. (Yet the rules only work for companies apparently, as the students would still be committing a crime)

A student can absolutely buy a text book and then teach the other students the information in it for free. That’s not redistribution. Redistribution would mean making copies of the book to hand out. That’s illegal for people and companies.

It seems like a lot of people misunderstand copyright so let’s be clear: the answer is yes. You can absolutely digitize your books. You can rip your movies and store them on a home server and run them through compression algorithms.

Copyright exists to prevent others from redistributing your work so as long as you’re doing all of that for personal use, the copyright owner has no say over what you do with it.

You even have some degree of latitude to create and distribute transformative works with a violation only occurring when you distribute something pretty damn close to a copy of the original. Some perfectly legal examples: create a word cloud of a book, analyze the tone of news article to help you trade stocks, produce an image containing the most prominent color in every frame of a movie, or create a search index of the words found on all websites on the internet.

You can absolutely do the same kinds of things an AI does with a work as a human.

Wikipedia has a whole list of citations on this very sentence lol.

There is near unanimous consensus among economists that tariffs are self-defeating and have a negative effect on economic growth and economic welfare

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff

Tariffs are a net negative. Always. The things produced will not be competitive on the global market, if they were, we’d already be making them. The higher prices always destroy more jobs than they create. Retaliatory tariffs destroy even more jobs. The higher prices drive down demand and make the working class consumer poorer. Always.

There’s no economic upside to tariffs, over any time horizon. They create a small number of jobs in a specific sector at a very expensive cost. Some politicians might decide that the enormous economic cost is worth it for other reasons, but a net positive they are not.

My place of work has a pretty high rate of pronoun signaling and I’ve found it immensely useful. Not just for the usual androgynous names line Pat or Elliott, but also I work with people all around the world, how would you refer to Jung Bae? Judging by the number of foreign people who have never seen my name, I imagine it goes both ways. And, yes, I also work with a number of nonbinary and trans people so of course it helps there too.

Some people refer to everybody, even those they know, as they/them and I honestly kinda like it. Been considering taking that habit on myself.

I think when you consider the rate of advancement of any technological species, “roughly the same level as us” basically implies that they got started at exactly the same time. Even an extra thousand years of technological advancement would put them far ahead of us. A million years would put them unimaginably far ahead.

On a cosmic scale, that’s nothing. That’s a tight window and given the like 8 billion years that planets with the required elements have had to form, I would doubt that no other species had a chance to surpass us.

ITT: A bunch of people who have never heard of information theory suddenly have very strong feelings about it.

Models are not improving? Since when? Last week? Newer models have been scoring higher and higher in both objective and subjective blind tests consistently. This sounds like the kind of delusional anti-AI shit that the OP was talking about. I mean, holy shit, to try to pass off “models aren’t improving” with a straight face.

Love that the picture associated with this article is Trump staring into the eclipse. Fucking moron.

If we’re in a simulation, it’s probably a massive universe-spanning one. We’re just a blip, both within the scale of the space of the universe and within the history of time of the universe. In that case, we’re not important enough for a simulation creator to even care to adjust our capabilities at all. They’re not watching us. We’re not the point of the simulation.

It can’t be expressed in any integer-based notation without an infinite number of digits. Only when expressed in some bases which are themselves, irrational. It’s infinity either way.

The number which famously has an infinite number of digits? I thought we were arguing against the real-ness of infinity.

Also note: the method I was describing is one of the ways in which pi can be calculated.

It destroys meaningful operations it comes into contact with, and requires invisible and growing workarounds to maintain (e.g. “countably” infinite vs “uncountably” infinite) which smells of fantasy, philosophically speaking.

This isn’t always true. The convergent series comes to mind, where an infinite summation can be resolved to a finite number.

It’s quite useful, though, to understand a curve or arc as having infinite edges in order to calculate its area. The area of a triangle is easy to calculate. Splitting the arc into two triangles by adding a point in the middle of the arc makes it easy to calculate the area… And so on, splitting the arc into an infinite number of triangles with an infinite number of points along the arc makes the area calculable to an arbitrary precision.

Is enshittification the scummiest thing you can think of? While other multinationals are paying for goon squads that kill people in other countries? While banks reorder daily transactions from largest to smallest so they can charge more overdraft fees, literally stealing from poor people? Even if enshittification is literally your biggest problem, you’d have to be living under a rock to think Google’s products are the most enshitified of all the garbage out there. You’ve never heard of anything from Meta? Amazon? Netflix? Microsoft?

I don’t know man. There’s a lot shittier business practices out there than paying to be the default search engine - which is laughably easy to change on any browser. Like marketplaces and services that pay to be exclusive sources of content and then use the fact that they’re the only source for most content to force extortionate deals on content creators and enshitify every aspect of the end user experience. Just to name one.

Social media is where most of the blatantly false propaganda lives. Getting all of your news from it makes you more susceptible to propaganda, not less. These are people who have nothing to form an opinion with except for what the loudest people around them are complaining about most. And propagandists are the loudest ones, complaining about made up bullshit.

I think also one thing to remember is that phonics and word sounds are not reading either due to the fact that English is a Frankenstein language where any letter or combination of letters often has a myriad of ways of being pronounced. You cannot learn to read without a healthy dose of memorization and contextual cluing. Letters are, at best, just another clue as to what the word could be.