Corrupt law enforcement and politicians everywhere applaud your stance. As do factory farm owners, oil company executives, and the rich and powerful in general.

There should be no expectation of privacy in public places. Harassment is a separate but related issue, though.

I’m firmly in the camp of one-party consent laws. It’s often the only way to hold people accountable for their actions. The rich and powerful shouldn’t be able to sue someone for being recorded. Or worse, have the government act as their lap dogs with arrests.

“IP theft” is a rhetorical term invented by the MPAA/RIAA in the 90s. It’s not a real crime. It’s just propaganda.

There’s no law on the books that even remotely resembles “IP theft”. Here’s what we’ve got:

• Copyright law. Which can be violated. Normally, when you violate copyright that’s a civil offense. Not a criminal one. Criminal prosecution of copyright violation is pretty rare, though there’s been a recent uptick with lawsuits against illegal IPTV sites and Anna’s Archive.
• Trademark law. This is all about dealing with counterfeits and fraud (e.g. misrepresenting a trademarked brand).
• Patent law. Pretty self explanatory, except software patents shouldn’t exist. Every software patent that’s every been granted is 100% bullshit and should never have happened.
• Trade secrets. Not really relevant to this discussion but there’s laws about it that are really, really hard to litigate (again, civil law). You could copy the secret recipe for Coke but that wouldn’t be “theft”. It’s… Complicated.
• Some obscure stuff like integrated circuit topography and in Europe there’s laws around databases.

Not a single one of these laws deals with “theft”. The entire concept of theft is orthogonal to intellectual property.

Until the MPAA/RIAA started their marketing campaigns in the 90s, “IP theft” as a concept didn’t exist. It wasn’t a thing. It still isn’t a thing. It’s propaganda/marketing BS.

Are you forgetting the IP theft

I’m going to come out and say it: IP theft isn’t a thing. IP is not something that can be stolen. It can have its license violated or it can be copied against the wishes of its owner. What it absolutely cannot be is “stolen”.

A car can be stolen. A phone can be stolen. A book or a CD or a DVD can be stolen. The concepts or ideas or literal content of what amounts to Intellectual Property cannot be stolen. It can only be copied.

If anything has been stolen it’s the commons that is the public domain. It was taken away for about four generations. Long enough that no one remembers the IP that’s only just now becoming public domain. It’s a loss far greater than anything related to AI.

I’ll also say this: Even if an AI were trained on nothing but public domain works (like most image generating AI a la ImageNET) people would still be spouting bullshit like, “it’s stealing IP!”

Have fun being labeled a terrorist!

A Microsoft AI being put in charge of that would come to that conclusion.

“EXTREME DANGER: This person wants to end software patents! They’ve been at it for over thirty years!”

Old news, but prescient since the Trump administration is blustering about criminalizing journalism.

Zuck is having all his keystrokes recorded too, right? Right?

Make sure the AI engineers get that data. Especially the passwords to his and the company’s bank accounts. All his accounts, actually.

There’s a reason why most businesses don’t implement keystroke logging.

At least it isn’t the wobbly kind 🤷

This is slightly unnerving to me. I mean, all my social media is already public but I post so much and so often, how would they even go through it all?

Me: “You want my social media accounts? Sure! They’re all public, and Google says there’s over 4.6 million words to go through—I actually had it run through them all to gather the real figures from its database—starting with newsgroups, then phBB forums, Slashdot, Digg, IRC logs, Reddit, Stack Overflow, and loads more. Good luck! I recommend sorting by most viewed and then most upvotes 👍”

Them: “Uh. What are newsgroups?”

Because much of my writing is highly technical, it’s not exactly “beach reading” material. So let’s assume the customs officer in charge of producing my biography can read it at about 150 WPM…

511 hours or 12.8 weeks if they’re only going to read during their 40-hour work schedule. They’d have to spend over three months reading my thoughts.

Imagine the line of people waiting behind me!

This is slightly unnerving to me. I mean, all my social media is already public but I post so much and so often, how would they even go through it all?

Me: “You want my social media accounts? Sure! They’re all public, and Google says there’s over 4.6 million words to go through—I actually had it run through them all to gather the real figures from its database—starting with newsgroups, then phBB forums, Slashdot, Digg, IRC logs, Reddit, Stack Overflow, and loads more. Good luck! I recommend sorting by most viewed and then most upvotes 👍”

Them: “Uh. What are newsgroups?”

Because much of my writing is highly technical, it’s not exactly “beach reading” material. So let’s assume the customs officer in charge of producing my biography can read it at about 150 WPM…

511 hours or 12.8 weeks if they’re only going to read during their 40-hour work schedule. They’d have to spend over three months reading my thoughts.

Imagine the line of people waiting behind me!

Just want to point out that nearly all new data centers use closed loop water cooling. That only makes sense in very, very dry places in the world that also have extremely cheap water.

For example, cooling towers would make no sense in Florida because the ambient humidity is too high. Even though water is plentiful.

Yeah. Light hair doesn’t work as well.

Oh my. This is a huge can of worms—especially on Lemmy. There’s a lot of anti-AI hate on this platform. Almost to the point of it being a religion.

For reference, when people say, “AI” they’re usually talking about Large Language Models (LLMs) and other forms of generative AI (e.g. diffusion models that make images). Having said that, “AI” is an enormous topic of which LLMs are a small, but increasingly popular part.

Furthermore, when people here on Lemmy say, “AI” they’re normally talking about “Big AI” which consists of:

• OpenAI (ChatGPT)
• Microsoft (Copilot)
• Anthropic (Claude)
• Meta (Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, Llama models, and more)
• Google (Gemini and shittons of other things people don’t see and often don’t even have names people outside of Google would recognize)
• Amazon (because they’re hosting the data centers that power a lot of the other players and also do AI stuff on their own)

Is AI inherently bad or evil? No. It’s just the latest way of giving instructions to a computer. Considering that all computer programs are literally just instructions, an AI model is just a really fancy and often expensive way of performing the same function. Albeit with a lot more breadth and flexibility. Note that I didn’t say “depth”, haha.

The “bad” or “evil” part of AI is mostly due to the large players (aka “Big AI”) spending literally over $1 trillion so far on data centers and hardware. There’s so much demand for their services that they’re having to build their own—often dirty, fossil fuel—power plants just to power it all.

A lot of the talk around data centers is based on myths. For example, generating an image with AI doesn’t use a liter of water. A study came out that no one actually read (beyond the summary) that stated that a really long conversation with an LLM could in theory use up half a liter of water, assuming the data center was powered by a fossil fuel power plant that was using water for cooling (as in, the heat dissipation required 0.5 liters of water from the cooling pond next to the power plant, not potable/drinking water).

LLMs do use up a lot of power though! People often assume this is from training the AIs (which I’ll get to in a moment) because everyone “knows” it’s a long, involved process that can take months (even with a $50 billion data center specifically made for AI). However, it’s actually all the people and businesses using AI that uses up all that energy. The biggest, most power-hungry step is “inference” which is the point where the LLM tries to figure out what you just asked of it.

The important point here is that AI is actually being used.* There’s real demand for it! It’s not just fools asking ChatGPT for strange pizza recipes. It’s mostly businesses using it for things like writing and checking code or investigating server logs for malicious activity or any number of very businessy IT things.

The demand for AI services is so great that they can’t build data centers fast enough. Big AI, specifically is having trouble keeping responses within satisfactory time windows. The business models are still developing but they’re actually not charging enough to make up for their spending in a lot of cases. Specifically, OpenAI and Microsoft are losing money like crazy, trying to compete.

I ran out of time… I’ll reply again about the copyright situation, training costs, and open weight (aka open source) models in a bit…

The reason why you hear this so often is because academia is designed to teach students based on a logical, reasonable curriculum. The curriculum will be mostly well-thought-out and cover all the important topics.

Then you take someone who followed this perfectly reasonable path and you place them in front of the total shitshow that is most businesses. Everything they think they know won’t be applicable because most of the time, logic and reason were not what drove adoption of any given tool or practice.

…and when he shows up in court, drunk.

Just write them out in hair on the wall 👍

I’m the protagonist of a show that got cancelled once I could dress myself.

Don’t be so hard on yourself! I’m sure you’re just one catastrophic heart failure away from greatness 👍

I’ve been researching this a bit… I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no AI bubble. In fact, we’re only just getting started down this road. Unless there’s some massive 100x efficiency breakthrough in training AI and inference, the entire world is going to be building seemingly endless AI data centers (and the normal compute kind, e.g. for stuff like AWS, Google/YouTube, Meta, banks) for at least a decade. Probably a little longer (12-15 years before demand levels out).

Everyone thinks that “AI data center” means ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc but there’s 10,000x more demand for AI than those services. Think: Pharmaceutical companies trying to find proteins, scientists (and big agriculture!) trying to model the weather, and other businesses trying to automate stuff. Not just software; robots and things like conveyor belts.

Another example: Ever use one of those self-checkouts that’s mostly just a camera pointing down, where you place the stuff you’re purchasing? That uses AI too.

Having said that, there is a great big bubble in AI: OpenAI, specifically. That will definitely pop one day. And hopefully, the DRAM bullshit will go along with it.

How did they solve the housing crisis? The rest of the world would like to know!

Peter drove a Ford!

“And Peter followed from a-Ford.” (Matthew 26:58)

Pontiac had some sales too:

“And the Lord gave them Solstice.” (Joshua 21:44)

The Bible even had the Fast and the Furious!

“The driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously.” (2 Kings 9:20)

Jehu probably drove a Plymouth Fury (with a lead foot).