[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

Dump o' interesting links from Zakaria's newsletter:

regardless of the actual fundamentals behind ai flows, it's important to always remember the lessons of classics such as these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cr...e_Popular_Mind

outdated in its sources and mode of discourse perhaps, but the kernel of its ideas remains useful.

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

regardless of the actual fundamentals behind ai flows, it's important to always remember the lessons of classics such as these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cr...e_Popular_Mind

outdated in its sources and mode of discourse perhaps, but the kernel of its ideas remains useful.

Thanks for the link.

Another good Le Bon: Cate.

Not a good Le Bon: Simon.

[The Soup Nazi]

TWENTY-TWO YEARS, MOTHERFUCKER!

ETA: "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by inside a jail cell for 22 years" - dunno who came up with that one but it's pretty good.

[!@#$%!]

on the continuing subject of russian propaganda, slovakia (slavo hi) is experiencing some disturbances with a pro russian candidate leading the polls.

this has been going on all summer. well, since last year really, but getting worse.

the election is september 30 :/

[The Soup Nazi]

I Watched a Democracy Die. I Don't Want to Do It Again.

[The Soup Nazi]

 

Spineless fuck.

[tw2113]

The GOP are desperate to nail an impeachment on Biden, to almost match the 2 that Trump got. It's kind of pathetic.

[!@#$%!]

i saw the rotten slimeball talking yesterday on live tv. truly vomit-inducing. pure fucking smarm and pretense. a human worm.

[The Soup Nazi]

Romney out. Lame - that was one Senate voice (and vote) against Q45. As long as he wasn't being offered the State Department, that is...

[The Soup Nazi]

Eww

[The Soup Nazi]

Opinion from The Guardian:

With democracy on the ballot, the mainstream press must change its ways

Ian Millhiser of Vox nailed the problem: “I worry the ‘Biden is old’ coverage is starting to take on the same character as the 2016 But Her Emails coverage – find something that is genuinely suboptimal about the Democratic candidate and dwell on it endlessly to ‘balance’ coverage of the criminal in charge of the GOP.”

[The Soup Nazi]

Opinion from The New York Times:

The Internet Is About to Get Much Worse

By Julia Angwin
Ms. Angwin is a contributing Opinion writer and an investigative journalist.

Greg Marston, a British voice actor, recently came across “Connor” online — an A.I.-generated clone of his voice, trained on a recording Mr. Marston had made in 2003. It was his voice uttering things he had never said.

Back then, he had recorded a session for IBM and later signed a release form allowing the recording to be used in many ways. Of course, at that time, Mr. Marston couldn’t envision that IBM would use anything more than the exact utterances he had recorded. Thanks to artificial intelligence, however, IBM was able to sell Mr. Marston’s decades-old sample to websites that are using it to build a synthetic voice that could say anything. Mr. Marston recently discovered his voice emanating from the Wimbledon website during the tennis tournament. (IBM said it is aware of Mr. Marston’s concern and is discussing it with him directly.)

His plight illustrates why many of our economy’s best-known creators are up in arms. We are in a time of eroding trust, as people realize that their contributions to a public space may be taken, monetized and potentially used to compete with them. When that erosion is complete, I worry that our digital public spaces might become even more polluted with untrustworthy content.

Already, artists are deleting their work from X, formerly known as Twitter, after the company said it would be using data from its platform to train its A.I. Hollywood writers and actors are on strike partly because they want to ensure their work is not fed into A.I. systems that companies could try to replace them with. News outlets including The New York Times and CNN have added files to their website to help prevent A.I. chatbots from scraping their content.

Authors are suing A.I. outfits, alleging that their books are included in the sites’ training data. OpenAI has argued, in a separate proceeding, that the use of copyrighted data for training A.I. systems is legal under the “fair use” provision of copyright law.

While creators of quality content are contesting how their work is being used, dubious A.I.-generated content is stampeding into the public sphere. NewsGuard has identified 475 A.I.-generated news and information websites in 14 languages. A.I.-generated music is flooding streaming websites and generating A.I. royalties for scammers. A.I.-generated books — including a mushroom foraging guide that could lead to mistakes in identifying highly poisonous fungi — are so prevalent on Amazon that the company is asking authors who self-publish on its Kindle platform to also declare if they are using A.I.

This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals. The traditional example of this is a public field that cattle can graze upon. Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.

We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay.

But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.

Consider, for instance, that the volunteers who build and maintain Wikipedia trusted that their work would be used according to the terms of their site, which requires attribution. Now some Wikipedians are apparently debating whether they have any legal recourse against chatbots that use their content without citing the source.

Regulators are trying to figure it out, too. The European Union is considering the first set of global restrictions on A.I., which would require some transparency from generative A.I. systems, including providing summaries of copyrighted data that was used to train its systems.

That would be a good step forward, since many A.I. systems do not fully disclose the data they were trained on. It has primarily been journalists who have dug up the murky data that lies beneath the glossy surface of the chatbots. A recent investigation detailed in The Atlantic revealed that more than 170,000 pirated books are included in the training data for Meta’s A.I. chatbot, Llama. A Washington Post investigation revealed that OpenAI’s ChatGPT relies on data scraped without consent from hundreds of thousands of websites.

But transparency is hardly enough to rebalance the power between those whose data is being exploited and the companies poised to cash in on the exploitation.

Tim Friedlander, founder and president of the National Association of Voice Actors, has called for A.I. companies to adopt ethical standards. He says that actors need three Cs: consent, control and compensation.

In fact, all of us need the three Cs. Whether we are professional actors or we just post pictures on social media, everyone should have the right to meaningful consent on whether we want our online lives fed into the giant A.I. machines.

And consent should not mean having to locate a bunch of hard-to-find opt-out buttons to click — which is where the industry is heading.

Compensation is harder to figure out, especially since most of the A.I. bots are primarily free services at the moment. But make no mistake, the A.I. industry is planning to and will make money from these systems, and when it does, there will be a reckoning with those whose works fueled the profits.

For people like Mr. Marston, their livelihoods are at stake. He estimates that his A.I. clone has already lost him jobs and will cut into his future earnings significantly. He is working with a lawyer to seek compensation. “I never agreed or consented to having my voice cloned, to see/hear it released to the public, thus competing against myself,” he told me.

But even those of us who don’t have a job directly threatened by A.I. think of writing that novel or composing a song or recording a TikTok or making a joke on social media. If we don’t have any protections from the A.I. data overgrazers, I worry that it will feel pointless to even try to create in public. And that would be a real tragedy.

[The Soup Nazi]

Whoa...

Judge rules Donald Trump defrauded banks, insurers while building real estate empire

And this isn't even one of the four indictments.

More:
https://news.google.com/stories/CAAqNggKIjBDQklTSGpvSmMzUnZjbmt0TXpZd1NoRUtEd2pKcj R1VENSSDVwTmRLSkVMT195Z0FQAQ?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

[!@#$%!]

lol the fraudster

cult members in thrall to the beast will nevertheless find ways to make this about hunter's laptop

---

meanwhile, a damaging government shutdown looms

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

meanwhile, a damaging government shutdown looms

Which is and will continue to be blamed on "Congress" and "Washington" and "all them politicians". ONLY ONE PARTY WANTS TO SHUT SHIT DOWN, MORONS.

[The Soup Nazi]

Dianne Feinstein dead at 90. No need to convince her to resign now, huh...

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

meanwhile, a damaging government shutdown looms

The Seinfeld Shutdown

"It's all impressively nihilistic..."

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

The Seinfeld Shutdown

"It's all impressively nihilistic..."

they kicked the can 45 days down the road for a glorious repeat in november, btw lmao

what a bunck of useless republican fucks...

but democrats saved the day (again)

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

on the continuing subject of russian propaganda, slovakia (slavo hi) is experiencing some disturbances with a pro russian candidate leading the polls.

this has been going on all summer. well, since last year really, but getting worse.

the election is september 30 :/

Things are looking (cautiously) up:

https://www.politico.eu/article/libe...it-polls-show/

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

Things are looking (cautiously) up:

https://www.politico.eu/article/libe...it-polls-show/

Wait, what?

Goddammit...