Interesting Links for 16-01-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once — How to Shoot a Sci-Fi Kung Fu Epic (on a Budget)

(tags:movies scifi MartialArts everything )

2. Text and data mining copyright exception proposal to encourage AI focus and innovation in the UK

(tags:UK ai data copyright )

3. Google's very expensive coders produce a security vulnerability in c/c++ every thousand lines of code. If you care about security then you shouldn't use them.

(tags:security programming memory )

Comments

[helen_keeble]

If I’m reading that copyright proposal correctly, it means that it would be considered legitimate use for someone to scan/ocr/download the contents of copyrighted books into a database, train an AI on it, and produce a commercial tool for generating similar text, right? That would seem a considerable land grab.

In fact, IIRC such a database already exists - didn’t Google get into conflicts with publishers over digitising contents from copyrighted books? So it would seem legal for Google to take that massive database and train an AI to produce derivative content.

I cannot see trad publishers being happy with that AT ALL.

(There would be even greater fury from authors, but government doesn’t care about the views of people who have the temerity to attempt to make a living in the arts)

I mean, it’s exactly what’s happened to visual artists having their work taken without permission and used to train AIs, but at least there (ethical considerations aside) it was content scraped from the open internet. Making it legal to just dive right in and train AIs on commercial text (…or scanned images, ripped dvds, recordings of performances, contemporary music archives, etc) without rights holder permission would seem to be opening a whole can of worms.

[mellowtigger]

#1 Very good movie. I keep intending to write about it.
#2 I have too many thoughts on AI, capitalism, and the nearing Star Trek/Orville economy. I need to organize them better.
#3 It reminds me of that old alleged quote, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." I trust Google code (even c/c++ code) as much as any other program, just not their corporation.

[jducoeur]

3 - I mean, yes: memory management in C/C++ is a horror. I switched away from them in, what, I think 2002? It kind of astonishes me that so many applications that don't need to be down-to-the-metal have continued using them for so long. And with the rise of far better native-compiled languages like Rust and Scala Native, I can't see ever wasting my time with them again.

(NB: I spent 15 years working professionally mainly in C and then C++. My distaste for them is very well-earned.)