#Copyright Statistics

[niharranjannayak]

The Collection of Statistics (Amendment) Bill, 2017 was introduced by the ‎Minister of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Mr. D.V.Sadananda Gowda in Lok Sabha on March 20, 2017. The Bill seeks to amend the Collection of #StatisticsAct, 2008.

The 2008 Act facilitates the collection of statistics related to #social, #economic, #demographic, #scientific and #environmental aspects, by central, state and local governments. It allows the appointment of statistics officers to collect information, and contains provisions to ensure security of information.

On the birth anniversary of eminent statistician Prof. P.C. Mahalanobis, India celebrates #NationalStatisticsDay to popularise the idea of increasing people's awareness of #statistics and encouraging them to apply them. #attorney #trademarkregistration #pharma #legal #medicolegal

[themirokai]

I got this comment on a story from my Other AO3 Account this morning.

(Info redacted because I prefer keeping these accounts separate but no one follows me on the side blog I have for that account.)

The story was posted almost a year ago and is relatively “popular” by my average statistics even though it has tropes and themes that are big turnoffs for a lot of people (hence separate accounts). This popularity is undoubtedly because it’s a Marvel Loki story and that fandom is massive.

So there is obviously an algorithm or a bot scrubbing ao3 statistics and leaving this comment on fics that meet a certain metric with the main character of the fic inserted into the comment.

I had a little time to kill this morning so I decided to investigate further. And y’all this is so predatory. Come on this journey with me. It made me mad. It may make you mad.

First, if you go to Webnovel’s website, you HAVE to choose between male lead or female lead stories before you can go any further. WTF?

And that’s weird, but this gets so much worse. This is basically a pay-to-read site that has different subscription models. Which… okay BUT! The authors don’t get paid! Look at that comment again. They’re promising a supportive and nurturing community, but zero monetary compensation. It’s basically, “post your stuff here so we can get paid and you can get… nice vibes?” I mean look at this Orwellian writing:

Using the phrase “pay-to-read model” in the same sentence as “qualitative changes in lifestyles for authors” deliberately makes you think that you can get paid and maybe even make a living on this website. But that’s not actually what it says and authors will not receive one red cent.

Oh but wait, the worst is still to come. In case this breaks containment (which I kind of hope it does) this is where I mention that I’m a lawyer in the US.

I don’t do intellectual property or copyright law but I do read and write contracts for a living. So I went to look at their terms of service. It was fun!

Highlights the first, in which Webnovel gets a license to do basically whatever they want with content you post on their site. This is how they get to be paid for people reading authors’ writing without paying them anything.

Highlights the second, in which Webnovel takes no responsibility for illegally profiting off of fan fic. This all says that the writer is 100% responsible for everything the writer posts (even though only Webnovel is making money from it).

Highlights the third which say that by posting, the author is representing that they have the legal right to use and to let Webnovel use the content according to these terms. So if a writer posts fan fiction and Webnovel makes money from people reading the fan fiction, and the House of the Mouse catches wise, these sections say that that’s ALL on the writer.

So that’s a little skeevy to start off with but the thing that is seriously shitty and made me make this post was that these assholes are coming to ao3. They are actively recruiting people in comments on their fan fiction. And they are saying they are big fans of the character you’re writing about and that they share your interests.

They are recruiting fan fiction writers and giving every impression that you can make money from posting fan fiction on their site and hiding the fact that you absolutely cannot but they can make money off of you while you try, deep in their terms of service which no one but a lawyer who writes fan fic and has some time to kill will read.

I see posts on here regularly from people who don’t understand how this stuff works, don’t understand that they (and others) can not legally make a financial profit from fan fiction. And there are tons of people who will not take the time to dig into the details.

Don’t deal with these bastards. Fuck Webnovel.

[dumb-butch-syndrome]

thanks for the thoughtful reply!

I'm not a professional artist so idk if I have enough skin in this game to give a properly considered answer (and I don't really want to speak for those who do), but to my understanding, calling generative AI plagiaristic comes from that place of them being by design incapable of providing attribution, regardless of how strongly their outputs are influenced by a specific artist. A human artist will typically know when it's appropriate to credit another artist with style / substance / etc. inspiration for one of their pieces and can provide attribution when appropriate. Generative AI has no way of knowing how heavily a specific artist's work has influenced its outputs because of the way a trained model works, so can't give attribution even if it's relevant or necessary.

When I added those tags, OP hadn't added the follow-ups that they were talking about copyright law, and I was looking at plagiarism from an academic standpoint rather than a legal one. In that framing I do still think plagiarism is a decent term for what these models do with their input data, if only because we don't currently have a more accurate word for the specific kind of large-scale impersonal unattributed use of other people's work that generative AI relies on. I don't know enough about copyright law (especially US copyright law, which I assume is what OP is talking about) to really have an opinion on that aspect.

The definition of "plagiarism" and "copying" being changed from "copying verbatim someone else's work" to "creating an entirely new never-seen-before piece of work with input from a tool that may have at one point read metadata about someone else's work" is such insane obvious batshit overreach, but people are repeating it as if it's a given just because it gives them a reason to hate the fucking machines.

So done with this conversation. After a year of trying to explain this stuff to people nicely I am just completely done with it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Studio execs love plausible sentence generators because they have a workflow that looks exactly like a writer-exec dynamic, only without any eye-rolling at the stupid “notes” the exec gives the writer.

All an exec wants is to bark out “Hey, nerd, make me another E.T., except make the hero a dog, and set it on Mars.” After the writer faithfully produces this script, the exec can say, “OK, put put a love interest in the second act, and give me a big gunfight at the climax,” and the writer dutifully makes the changes.

This is exactly how prompting an LLM works.

A writer and a studio exec are lost in the desert, dying of thirst.

Just as they are about to perish, they come upon an oasis, with a cool sparkling pool of water.

The writer drops to their knees and thanks the fates for saving their lives.

But then, the studio exec unzips his pants, pulls out his cock and starts pissing in the water.

“What the fuck are you doing?” the writer demands.

“Don’t worry,” the exec says, “I’m making it better.”

- Everything Made By an AI Is In the Public Domain: The US Copyright Office offers creative workers a powerful labor protective

THIS IS THE LAST DAY FOR MY KICKSTARTER for the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.

On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

[apod]

2024 October 20

Dark Matter in a Simulated Universe Illustration Credit & Copyright: Tom Abel & Ralf Kaehler (KIPAC, SLAC), AMNH

Explanation: Is our universe haunted? It might look that way on this dark matter map. The gravity of unseen dark matter is the leading explanation for why galaxies rotate so fast, why galaxies orbit clusters so fast, why gravitational lenses so strongly deflect light, and why visible matter is distributed as it is both in the local universe and on the cosmic microwave background. The featured image from the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium Space Show Dark Universe highlights one example of how pervasive dark matter might haunt our universe. In this frame from a detailed computer simulation, complex filaments of dark matter, shown in black, are strewn about the universe like spider webs, while the relatively rare clumps of familiar baryonic matter are colored orange. These simulations are good statistical matches to astronomical observations. In what is perhaps a scarier turn of events, dark matter -- although quite strange and in an unknown form -- is no longer thought to be the strangest source of gravity in the universe. That honor now falls to dark energy, a more uniform source of repulsive gravity that seems to now dominate the expansion of the entire universe.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap241020.html

[libraford]

I'm a disbeliever in generative content for the obvious reasons, but also for a surprise personal reason- the friends that I've had who decided that they were going to become 'AI artists' either got bored with it and 'retired' after a single season or became hostile and threatened me when I informed them of the potential copyright hurdles that lie ahead (and also didn't have very much reading comprehension in the first place because they kept sending me articles to prove their point that actually... proved mine.) And I realize that this is a very small pool of data and not really much in terms of actual statistics, but... it kind of does seem the way it goes.

[whompthatsucker1981]

real actual nonhostile question with a preamble: i think a lot of artists consider NN-generated images as an existential threat to their ability to use art as a tool to survive under capitalism, and it's frequently kind of disheartening to think about what this is going to do to artists who rely on commissions / freelance storyboarding / etc. i don't really care whether or not nn-generated images are "true art" because like, that's not really important or worth pursuing as a philosophical question, but i also don't understand how (under capitalism) the rise of it is anything except a bleak portent for the future of artists

thanks for asking! i feel like it's good addressing the idea of the existential threat, the fears and feelings that artists have as to being replaced are real, but personally i am cynical as to the extent that people make it out to be a threat. and also i wanna say my piece in defense of discussions about art and meaning.

the threat of automation, and implementation of technologies that make certain jobs obsolete is not something new at all in labor history and in art labor history. industrial printing, stock photography, art assets, cgi, digital art programs, etc, are all technologies that have cut down on the number of art jobs that weren't something you could cut corners and labor off at one point. so why do neural networks feel like more of a threat? one thing is that they do what the metaphorical "make an image" button that has been used countless times in arguments on digital art programs does, so if the fake button that was made up to win an argument on the validity of digital art exists, then what will become of digital art? so people panic.

but i think that we need to be realistic as to what neural net image generation does. no matter how insanely huge the data pool they pull from is, the medium is, in the simplest terms, limited as to the arrangement of pixels that are statistically likely to be together given certain keywords, and we only recognize the output as symbols because of pattern recognition. a neural net doesn't know about gestalt, visual appeal, continuity, form, composition, etc. there are whole areas of the art industry that ai art serves especially badly, like sequential arts, scientific illustration, drafting, graphic design, etc. and regardless, neural nets are tools. they need human oversight to work, and to deal with the products generated. and because of the medium's limitations and inherent jankiness, it's less work to hire a human professional to just do a full job than to try and wrangle a neural net.

as to the areas of the art industry that are at risk of losing job opportunities to ai like freelance illustration and concept art, they are seen as replaceable to an industry that already overworks, underpays, and treats them as disposable. with or without ai, artists work in precarized conditions without protections of organized labor, even moreso in case of freelancers. the fault is not of ai in itself, but in how it's yielded as a tool by capital to threaten workers. the current entertainment industry strikes are in part because of this, and if the new wga contract says anything, it's that a favorable outcome is possible. pressure capital to let go of the tools and question everyone who proposes increased copyright enforcement as the solution. intellectual property serves capital and not the working artist.

however, automation and ai implementation is not unique to the art industry. service jobs, manufacturing workers and many others are also at risk at losing out jobs to further automation due to capital's interest in maximizing profits at the cost of human lives, but you don't see as much online outrage because they are seen as unskilled and uncreative. the artist is seen as having a prestige position in society, if creativity is what makes us human, the artist symbolizes this belief - so if automation comes for the artist then people feel like all is lost. but art is an industry like any other and artists are not of more intrinsic value than any manual laborer. the prestige position of artist also makes artists act against class interest by cooperating with corporations and promoting ip law (which is a bad thing. take the shitshow of the music industry for example), and artists feel owed upward social mobility for the perceived merits of creativity and artistic genius.

as an artist and a marxist i say we need to exercise thinking about art, meaning and the role of the artist. the average prompt writer churning out big titty thomas kinkade paintings posting on twitter on how human made art will become obsolete doesnt know how to think about art. art isn't about making pretty pictures, but is about communication. the average fanartist underselling their work doesn't know that either. discussions on art and meaning may look circular and frustrating if you come in bad faith, but it's what exercises critical thinking and nuance.

[pigglepiephi]

I cannot stop laughing at the writer of The Trainee so obviously being a Man Utd fan ⚽️🔴

A second Giggs mention in two episodes 🤣

Love the assumption the audience knows their English Premier League history, players and statistics! I know the PL is big in Thailand but still!

This is true. Giggs’s Premier League assist record of 162 is unlikely to ever be broken given he played for 23 seasons.

Joking aside it was actually a cute metaphor to validate Ryan’s contribution. He thinks he’s pretty useless whereas he’s actually pretty vital to the running of his family’s business. He needs some time and mentoring to become that at work too.

He also needed from Jane validation that his contribution is worthwhile.

I was wondering why Canon weren’t sponsoring this show, but I guess you can’t have a faulty sponsored printer!

Ryan getting to assist the kids footy game (with a very basic pass mirroring the printer problem he solved) but one he got to celebrate, was actually a really sweet wrap up to the episode 😌

lol at these AI generated Giggs images which I guess passed any copyright or image rights infringements 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[biolizardboils]

Presenting, for possibly the first time anywhere on the entire Internet... the Official 3-D Hypno-Ring instruction manual!

Transcription and extra notes under the cut!

__________________

OFFICIAL 3-D Hypno-Ring™ Instruction Manual

WARNING: Improper use of this ring may result in irreversible mental disturbances and severe psychological trauma. Keep out of reach of mad scientists and evil geniuses.

©1997 The Li’l Wiseguy Novelty Co.

__________________

⚡ WELCOME to the WONDERFUL WORLD of HYPNOSIS! ⚡

In this booklet, you’ll learn how to use your new 3-D Hypno-Ring to amaze your friends, control your enemies, and rule the world!

[NOTE: This ring is for entertainment purposes only. The Li’l Wiseguy Novelty Company hereby disclaims all responsibility for any global conquests which may result from the use or misuse of the 3-D Hypno-Ring.]

__________________

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Put the 3-D Hypno-Ring on your finger—DANGER: DO NOT STARE DIRECTLY INTO THE RING! 2. Ask a friend to stare directly into the ring. 3. Slowly move the ring back and forth. 4. Instruct your friend to stare deeper and deeper into the ring. Say the word “deeper” over and over again, very slowly.

__________________

5 [sic] Tell your friend that he or she is getting very sleepy. Say the words “very sleepy” again and again, slower and slower. 6. When your friend closes his or her eyes, say these words: “You are under my spell. When I snap my fingers, you will obey my every command!” 7. Now have some fun! Turn them into a dog...or a banana. Tell them to do all your homework from now on...

__________________

...or make ‘em clean your room. Use your imagination- it’s fun! 8. [sic] To safely bring a person out of a trance, just snap your fingers, then give them a hug.

DO NOT POUR WATER ON THEIR HEADS!

[DANGER: The 3-D Hypno Ring [sic] may have an opposite effect on adult females. Who knew?]

__________________

Caution: The 3-D Hypno Ring may cause headaches, nausea, runny nose, diaper rash, watery eyes, post-nasal drip, upset stomach, nervousness, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, increased appetite, hiccups, hives, tunnel vision, projectile diarrhea, gingivitis, temporary hallucinations, irreversible brain damage, halitosis, fever, dizziness, excessive hair growth on the shoulders and upper back, sore throat, coughing, interest in yoga, pink-eye, tennis elbow, runner’s knee, athlete’s foot, bowler’s belly, pitcher’s mound, secretaries’ day, author’s misanthropism, dejà vu...

__________________

...dejà vu, stiffness in joints, stubbed toes, weeping, gnashing of teeth, drooling, snoring, severe belching and flatulence, vertigo, receding hairline, dandruff, ring-around-the-collar, stuffy nose, sneezing, tingling in extremities, achy-breaky heart, stinky-winky feet, split ends, profuse sweating, an uncontrollable urge to watch Bette Midler movies, paranoia, ingrown toenails, and/or chapped lips.

It’s Fun for the Whole Family!

__________________

WARNING!!!

Whatever you do, don’t pour water on anybody’s head while they are in a trance! This will cause the hypnotized person to slip back and forth from trance to reality whenever they hear the sound of fingers snapping.

TM &© 2001 Day [sic] Pilkey

__________________

Notes:

This thing is 4 pages longer than I expected (including the front and back “covers”)?? To think that this vital statistic went undocumented for so long...

The 2001 copyright date on the package sticker has been visible in photos for years; despite this, I’ve hesitated on pinning this as the Ring’s production date. The mention of the Works-Opposite-On-Women thing makes me more confident that the manual, at least, was added to the package in 2001, perhaps close to or after Book 5 dropped that August. (I’d still say the Ring itself is still up in the air, given the multiple claims of it being given out as early as 1997. Which brings up some more questions: Did those early Rings come with a different manual and sticker, or none at all?)

Speaking of the Works-Opposite-On-Women thing, the wording of “may” kills me fghjf. It’s like the Company found this glaring malfunction during testing and went “oh well, off to mass production!” No wonder they got shut down lol

The back cover looks exactly as it appeared in Book 1, down to the sentence breaks! The only addition is the copyright info on the right side.

I’ve been laughing at “Day Pilkey” for 20 minutes now lol. I thought of correcting all the typos in my transcription, but they’re cute to me so I left them in

Somehow it never occurred to me that Dav himself might’ve written this manual. The long list of silly side-effects is a big giveaway. There’s little guarantee he’ll remember the answer after all this time, but it’s a question I’ll be keeping in mind just in case.

The Ring itself is so tiny that I’m scared to wear it fhgjghj, it might get stuck past my knuckle or even break! Also I can’t snap my fingers so it’s not like I could use it anyway

Besides the Black Lenticular Spiral/Red Light-Up Spiral thing, there’s another small difference between this Ring and the Movie-era one. This one has “3-D” printed vertically on its shoulders and “Hypno-Ring” printed horizontally on its halo; the Movie one has the full name on its halo, minus the hyphen between 3 and D. (Look up “ring anatomy” if that sentence doesn’t make sense.)

The package is resealable, so I’ve put everything back in. I’ll be storing it in the little plastic chest I keep my first-edition CU books in, away from excess heat, excess light, and—most importantly—the wrong hands!

I’ve been waiting 20 years to get my hands on this thing. (Well, okay, first I stewed about it for about 1-3 years as a kid, then forgot about it for 11, then suddenly remembered it and stewed for 6 more, but you get this gist.) It’s nuts to finally hold it in my hands, let alone be the first to preserve a piece of it. Let this be a lesson to all: no matter how long it takes or how silly it is, your personal Holy Grail still exists for the taking... though it might cost over 40 bucks!

[unforth]

I’m sorry, I’m confused, is all AI equally environmentally damaging, or just AI based on Language Learning Models? I can’t find search results that tell me what else AI can be based on if not LLMs. Would a CBT “therapist” AI bot count as an LLM? I know therapy +AI is not private and has ethical concerns but for non sensitive things it worked way better for me than any human therapist but based on your post it seems like I should stop using it for the sake of the environment

Anon, your therapist bot is an LLM.

Look, I can't give you permission, but thinking that a therapy bot is better than a human therapist is A Choice and the therapy bot is generating sentences word by word using statistical analysis of "the word that it thinks makes the most sense to come next based on its analysis of input text-based data." Chatbots that generate "original" content (as opposed to, like, basically running a search and outputting pre-generated content from the FAQ or whatever) definitely are language learning models. I'm about as far from an expert as it's possible to be so I don't know enough to say more than that, but regardless... yeah, idk really know what you want from me anon? If you think the help it gives you is worth the environmental consequences and, ya know, the massive unethical theft of copyrighted material used to teach it, then you do you.

But yes, therapist bot is an LLM, and yes, it's burning disproportionate amounts of resources compared to many other tech uses but not all, and yes, only you can decide where your priorities lay, and I mean that honestly and not, like, snarkily. No one else can tell you if the cost is worth the benefit.

[shituationist]

assuaging my anxieties about machine learning over the last week, I learn that despite there being about ten years of doom-saying about the full automation of radiomics, there's actually a shortage of radiologists now (and, also, the machine learning algorithms that are supposed to be able to detect cancers better than human doctors are very often giving overconfident predictions). truck driving was supposed to be completely automated by now, but my grampa is still truckin' and will probably get to retire as a trucker. companies like GM are now throwing decreasing amounts of money at autonomous vehicle research after throwing billions at cars that can just barely ferry people around san francisco (and sometimes still fails), the most mapped and trained upon set of roads in the world. (imagine the cost to train these things for a city with dilapidated infrastructure, where the lines in the road have faded away, like, say, Shreveport, LA).

we now have transformer-based models that are able to provide contextually relevant responses, but the responses are often wrong, and often in subtle ways that require expertise to needle out. the possibility of giving a wrong response is always there - it's a stochastic next-word prediction algorithm based on statistical inferences gleaned from the training data, with no innate understanding of the symbols its producing. image generators are questionably legal (at least the way they were trained and how that effects the output of essentially copyrighted material). graphic designers, rather than being replaced by them, are already using them as a tool, and I've already seen local designers do this (which I find cheap and ugly - one taco place hired a local designer to make a graphic for them - the tacos looked like taco bell's, not the actual restaurant's, and you could see artefacts from the generation process everywhere). for the most part, what they produce is visually ugly and requires extensive touchups - if the model even gives you an output you can edit. the role of the designer as designer is still there - they are still the arbiter of good taste, and the value of a graphic designer is still based on whether or not they have a well developed aesthetic taste themself.

for the most part, everything is in tech demo phase, and this is after getting trained on nearly the sum total of available human produced data, which is already a problem for generalized performance. while a lot of these systems perform well on older, flawed, benchmarks, newer benchmarks show that these systems (including GPT-4 with plugins) consistently fail to compete with humans equipped with everyday knowledge.

there is also a huge problem with the benchmarks typically used to measure progress in machine learning that impact their real world use (and tell us we should probably be more cautious because the human use of these tools is bound to be reckless given the hype they've received). back to radiomics, some machine learning models barely generalize at all, and only perform slightly better than chance at identifying pneumonia in pediatric cases when it's exposed to external datasets (external to the hospital where the data it was trained on came from). other issues, like data leakage, make popular benchmarks often an overoptimistic measure of success.

very few researchers in machine learning are recognizing these limits. that probably has to do with the academic and commercial incentives towards publishing overconfident results. many papers are not even in principle reproducible, because the code, training data, etc., is simply not provided. "publish or perish", the bias journals have towards positive results, and the desire of tech companies to get continued funding while "AI" is the hot buzzword, all combined this year for the perfect storm of techno-hype.

which is not to say that machine learning is useless. their use as glorified statistical methods has been a boon for scientists, when those scientists understand what's going on under the hood. in a medical context, tempered use of machine learning has definitely saved lives already. some programmers swear that copilot has made them marginally more productive, by autocompleting sometimes tedious boilerplate code (although, hey, we've had code generators doing this for several decades). it's probably marginally faster to ask a service "how do I reverse a string" than to look through the docs (although, if you had read the docs to begin with would you even need to take the risk of the service getting it wrong?) people have a lot of fun with the image generators, because one-off memes don't require high quality aesthetics to get a chuckle before the user scrolls away (only psychopaths like me look at these images for artefacts). doctors will continue to use statistical tools in the wider machine learning tool set to augment their provision of care, if these were designed and implemented carefully, with a mind to their limitations.

anyway, i hope posting this will assuage my anxieties for another quarter at least.

[pathfinderunlocked]

Moontoucher Vizier - CR7 Wizard

An archwizard responsible for creating a lycanthrope curse.

Artwork is in-game art from Hearthstone, by James Ryman, copyright Blizzard Entertainment.

This vizier, an accomplished wizard, learned of a way to magically induce the lycanthrope curse, and learned that creatures infected by this curse became stronger.  In an attempt to fortify his nation's position against the encroaching undead, he began experimenting with this curse, inflicting it on soldiers under his command in a fortress on the nation's border.

The moontoucher vizier is based somewhat on Archmage Arugal from Warcraft. I designed him to be fought alongside several werewolves - the basic CR 2 werewolf stat block is perfectly fine, but I used custom werewolves that have claws and inflict disfiguring touch on a successful claw attack. He casts rage and bone fists on the werewolves as soon as he gets a chance, before battle if possible, and casts moonstruck on enemies, preferably spellcasters If his enemies get within his melee range, he'll cast forced mutation and disfiguring touch before teleporting away with his ring of return, which is keyed to three different points around the room, if possible. If he's caught in a fight away from his keyed points, he'll set up one new point ASAP.

The Ring of Return is an official magic item from Ultimate Equipment page 173, but it's not listed on Archives of Nethys because... there's another unrelated item with the same name, and the website developers got confused. Its high value increases his CR by 1.

Moontoucher Vizier - CR 7

The robed man's cloth headgear has massive horns, his eyes glow with green fire, and the staff he holds blazes with magical energy.

XP 2,400 Male human transmuter wizard 7 NE Medium humanoid (human) Init +2 Senses Perception +6

DEFENSE

AC 17, touch 13, flat-footed 14 (+2 Dex, +1 dodge, +4 mage armor) hp 55 (7d6+28) Fort +5, Ref +6, Will +8

OFFENSE

Speed 50 ft. (30 ft. without animal aspect) Melee mwk quarterstaff +3 (1d6-1)

Wizard Spells Prepared (CL 7th; concentration +14) 4th—moonstruck (2) (CL 8th, DC 20) 3rd—beast shape I, forced mutation (DC 18), rage 2nd—animal aspect (already cast, raptor, CL 8th), bone fists, defensive shock, disfiguring touch (touch +2, DC 16) 1st—depilate (DC 16), expeditious retreat, magic missile (3), protection from evil 0—detect magic, mage hand, mending, read magic

STATISTICS

Str 8, Dex 14, Con 16, Int 20, Wis 12, Cha 8 Base Atk +3; CMB +2; CMD 16 Feats Arcane Discovery (Forest's Blessing), Arcane Discovery (Multimorph), Combat Casting, Dodge, Craft Wondrous Item, Scribe Scroll, Toughness Skills Craft (alchemy) +11, Heal +7, Knowledge (arcana, local, history, nature) +15, Linguistics +12, Perception +4, Spellcraft +15; Racial Bonuses +2 Craft (alchemy) Languages Aklo, Abyssal, Celestial, Common, Elven, Draconic, Giant, Gnomish, Infernal, Sylvan SQ arcane bond (staff), arcane school (transmutation), industrious Gear cloak of resistance +2, headband of vast intelligence +2 (perception), mwk quarterstaff (arcane bonded item), ring of return, scroll of mage armor x4 (1 already used), spellbook (prepared spells, face of the devourer, bull's strength, monstrous physique I, phase step)

EQUIPMENT ABILITIES

Arcane Bond (Su) Once per day, while holding his arcane bonded item (his masterwork quarterstaff), the moontoucher vizier can cast any spell he knows without needing to prepare it ahead of time or expend a spell slot.

Ring of Return Three times per day, the wearer of the ring can, as a move action, use it to form a link with the particular 5-foot square she occupies at that moment. This causes one of the stones on the ring to glow. As a swift action, the wearer of the ring can teleport to any unoccupied linked square within 100 feet.

The moontoucher vizier typically has all three stones linked to different 5-foot squares in his lair or the area he expects to fight in, if possible.

SPECIAL ABILITIES

Multimorph (Su) When the moontoucher vizier casts a spell of the polymorph subschool on himself, he may expend 1 minute of the spell’s duration as a standard action to assume another form allowed by the spell.

Typically, the moontouched vizier begins combat with animal aspect already cast, and thus can alter its effects with Multimorph.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

That means that for a work to be eligible for copyright in the USA, it must satisfy three criteria:

1. It must be creative. Copyright does not apply to non-creative works (say, a phone book listing everyone in a town in alphabetical order), even if the work required a lot of labor. Copyright does not protect effort, it protects creativity. You can spend your whole life making a phone book and get no copyright, but the haiku you toss off in ten seconds while drunk gets copyright’s full protection. 2. It must be tangible. Copyright only applies to creative works that are “fixed in a tangible medium.” A dance isn’t copyrightable, but a video of someone dancing is, as is a written description of the dance in choreographers’ notation. A singer can’t copyright the act of singing, but they can copyright the recording of the song. 3. It must be of human authorship. Only humans are eligible for copyright. A beehive’s combs may be beautiful, but they can’t be copyrighted. An elephant’s paintings may be creative, but they can’t be copyrighted. A monkey’s selfie may be iconic, but it can’t be copyrighted.

The works an algorithm generates —be they still images, audio recordings, text, or videos — cannot be copyrighted.

For creative workers, this is huge. Our bosses, like all bosses, relish the thought of firing us all and making us homeless. You will never love anything as much as your boss hates paying you. That’s why the most rampant form of theft in America is wage theft. Just the thought of firing workers and replacing them with chatbots is enough to invoke dangerous, persistent priapism in the boardrooms of corporate America.

- Everything Made By an AI Is In the Public Domain: The US Copyright Office offers creative workers a powerful labor protective

THIS IS THE LAST DAY FOR MY KICKSTARTER for the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.

On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

[solnecco]

Hi! I saw the situation with a YouTuber stealing your art in their thumbnail, and I just wanted to send some support. Do not feel bad when they're childish enough to threaten + harass you over video statistics of all things. Like, HUH? Those stats wouldn't be "ruined" if they had the moral integrity to credit you in the first place 😭 I always love seeing your work, keep it up!!

Thank you anon! Yeah it's such a dumb situation because bruh why blame me for "killing" your channel when all I did was just protect my own art, dude shouldn't have stolen my art for the thumbnail in the first place 🤷

For anyone wondering what's up, the situation is on my twitter. (Please do not harass the guy in any way, as he no longer is using my art or anything and I would like this to just End)

it's quite... baffling of a situation. and I thought it got resolved because the guy did change the thumbnail (and I filed a copyright retraction so he would've get striked/forced removal) and I thought that would be the end of it. but then dude deleted the video and sent hate at me lol so idk anymore

[lemmaeof]

getting really fucking tired of people who don't know how generative AI works comparing AI "training" to how people learn as an artist because they're jus not even remotely the same thing on any level

artists take inspiration and learn by seeing something, going "I want to do something like that", and practicing that specific thing until they're satisfied with it, while AI are "trained" by force-feeding them five billion images (including literal child pornography, it turns out) to build a statistical model of what certain things "look like"

there's no intentionality to AI - even if you're feeding stable diffusion source pics to tune it, it was already pre-trained on the laion data set - at most you're amplifying noise

just get the concept of people's problem with AI being copyright out of your head, the problem is that it's an inauditable black box that's designed from the ground up to destroy the concept of intentionality in art in order to generate infinite """content""" sludge for capitalists

[pingnova]

Generative "AI", American copyright, and fanworks

Many folks have questions about what generative "AI" tools mean for copyright - and fanworks like fanfic and fanart. I've compiled here a list of basic reading on the status of fanworks in the copyright world and what AI is, as well as an evolving list of legal coverage of machine-made works.

The short and dirty:

Fanworks are not legally derivative, they are transformative, which you might recognize from the name of Ao3's parent org the Organization for Transformative Works. Generative "AI" content is derivative, which is not legally allowed without proper licensing. Fanfiction and AI output aren't the same thing, but corporations would like you to think so. They'd like you to think anything if it meant they could once again gain the momentum to change copyright law in their favor, whether that meant scrapping it or expanding it to their tastes. The articles I include can hopefully help elaborate.

The basics of fanwork and copyright law:

Rebecca Tushnet, Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law, 17 Loy. L.A. Ent. L. Rev. 651 (1997). https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/elr/vol17/iss3/8 (full text, pdf)

Fanworks rely on fulfilling the transformative portion of the fair use test in copyright law. They also shouldn't make money, in order to not compete with the original work.

Can generative AI output or training material be fair use? Overview of case law as we wait for the outcome of multiple lawsuits addressing this question. (Sep 22 2023)

What is the "AI" we keep hearing about anyway?

Statistics, machine learning, and artifical intelligence are the same thing - but "AI" rakes in more cash and acclaim

Generative AI is derivative and can only create what it has been fed, which perpetuates social ills but also illustrates what it really is - not human "intelligence", but a statistical machine

For example, fanfiction generated by a number of the free big name tools somehow manages to be straight and confusingly narrated

Why are corporations so invested in generative AI? AI in general?

An interview with an AI engineer who uses AI to generate endless patent applications - to profit from ideas before they are even invented

If corporations all use the same AI to fix housing prices as a cartel, they want the feds to agree its the machine's fault, not theirs

Even if generative AI improves to the point that it is totally unbiased and can write just as well as a human, it is still a machine. A tool, not a person. Corporations will try to scapegoat it by confusing the conversation.

Recent coverage on AI and copyright:

DC copyright court strikes down machine ownership: copyright protection is only for humans (Aug 18 2023)

Generative AI use core issue in Writer's Guild strike and eventual studio agreement (Sep 27 2023)

Thompson Reuters suit against AI company that trained on TR's content goes to jury trial (Sep 26 2023)

Official links

US Copyright Office homepage for their coverage on AI investigations (continuously updated)

Congressional research report on the issue of AI use and copyright law (Sep 29 2023)