Reading through the opinion, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this ruling come up in defense of chatbots trained on copyrighted works.

A provider induces infringement if it actively encourages
infringement through specific acts. Grokster, 545 U. S., at
942 (Ginsburg, J., concurring). For example, in Grokster,
we held that a jury could find two file-sharing software com-
panies liable for inducement. Id., at 941 (majority opinion).
The companies promoted and marketed their software as a
tool to infringe copyrights. Id., at 926. The “principal ob-
ject” of their business models “was use of their software to
download copyrighted works.”

“Sure, it can rip off copyrighted works, but your honor, we pinky promise that was never our principal object”. I could see it flying. Interestingly enough, the US Solicitor General explicitly brought up DMCA safe harbor in its amicus brief (siding with Cox):

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),
Pub. L. No. 105-304, 112 Stat. 2860 (17 U.S.C. 512), gave
service providers, including ISPs, a safe-harbor defense
to claims of copyright infringement. That defense
shields ISPs from liability for copyright infringement
based on, among other things, “the provider’s transmit-
ting, routing, or providing connections for, material
through a system or network controlled or operated by
or for the service provider.” 17 U.S.C. 512(a). To qual-
ify for that safe harbor, the service provider must
“adopt[] and reasonably implement[] * * * a policy that
provides for the termination in appropriate circum-
stances of subscribers * * * who are repeat infringers.”

I’d expect this admin to brief the court in a way that favors Musk et al, and it kind of makes sense that you’d want to bolster safe harbor protections, but I imagine a safe harbor defense of LLMs would require the reasonable policy of not training your LLM on a bunch of copyrighted works without their permission, with the express intent of creating derivative works on demand for your paying clients.

Opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-171_bq7d.pdf

US SG amicus brief: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24-171/359730/20250527172556075_Cox-Sony.CVSG.pdf

The grant application practically writes itself.

Yeah, I know a bunch of people who grow zucchini and they frequently harvest more than they could possibly use. they literally can’t give it away sometimes. maybe that’s why people who don’t like zucchini don’t like gardeners? Because they don’t want the produce zucchini growers are constantly trying to offload? Bit of a thinker.

Right, i mean if you made the context window enormous, such that you can include the entire set of embeddings and a set of memories (or maybe, an index of memories that can be “recalled” with keywords) you’ve got a self-observing loop that can learn and remember facts about itself. I’m not saying that’s AGI, but I find it somewhat unsettling that we don’t have an agreed-upon definition. If a for-profit corporation made an AI that could be considered a person with rights, I imagine they’d be reluctant to be convincing about it.

Yeah I think for it to be a proper strange loop (if that is indeed a useful proxy for consciousness-- I think there’s room for debate on that) it would need to be able to take it’s entire “self” i.e. the whole model, weights, and all memories, as input in order to iterate on itself. I agree that it probably wouldn’t work for the current commercial applications of LLMs, but it not what being what commercial LLMs do, doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done for research purposes.

There’s no reason an LLM couldn’t be hooked up to a database, where it can save outputs and then retrieve them again to “think” further about them. In fact, any LLM that can answer questions about previous prompts/responses has to be able to do this. If you prompted an LLM to review all of it’s database entries, generate a new response based on that data, then save that output to the database and repeat at regular intervals, I could see calling that a kind of thinking. If you do the same process but with the whole model and all the DB entries, that’s in the region of what I’d call a strange loop. Is that AGI? I don’t think so, but I also don’t know how I would define AGI, or if I’d recognize it if someone built it.

I don’t care for zucchini and I’m in full support of people being able to grow their own food. I’m not sure how the two are related.

This is anecdotal but I’ve never run out of stamina with my finger up my ass so Tom might be on to something.

Yeah the electoral college is a weird, poorly constructed indirect democracy. I think we should do away with it. Still, electors are elected by the state votes, and congressional representatives (state and national) are elected directly. I think there’s plenty to criticize about the American system, but to go from “it’s got serious problems” to “it’s not a democracy” seems like too far a reach for me. Elections still have consequences in America, and as long as that’s true I think its still technically a democracy.

I’ve always wanted to deploy Chaos Monkey for its actual purpose, but I’ve never been in charge of a big enough infra to make it worth the time. I have turned off databases just to see who files a ticket, which seems in the same spirit.

symlink: !vexillology@lemmy.world

The horror of being a senior admin is realizing that the whole thing could live or die based solely on your actions and decisions. And that you will be blamed.

Validate your backups regularly.

Also, make backups.

I think what you’re describing is usually called direct democracy. If that’s the only kind of democracy you think is real democracy, I guess we’ll have to differ. I think there’s nothing inherently undemocratic about having elected representatives perform certain functions. I think at some scale it helps to have middle layers more than it hurts. That’s not to say direct democracy wouldn’t be preferable, I don’t know that I have a well-formed opinion on that. But if a system has consequential elections, no matter the structure of the government they elect, I’d call that a democracy.

Someone sat through one too many corny presentation jokes and decided to do something about it.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I know Whedon’s a dirtbag but they are catchy tunes performed by a stellar cast. I keep them all in the shuffle.

I’ve definitely seen the “Now the Presidential elections are over, time to immediately focus on the midterms” variations that come about every four years, but they’re usually calls to action, not “just sit back and relax, the system is working as intended”. That… honestly just sounds like technically bad propaganda. If propaganists can’t get their targets in a rage about something, they’re leaving them open to someone who can.

I don’t think Mamdani is perfect, but I have a hard time believing his policies were decided on by the ruling class. Will they fight the implementation of those policies? Of course they will. Those with a need for power will never concedes an inch. That doesn’t mean that wasn’t a free and fair election decided by the people of NYC.

Also, IDK what propaganda machine you’re listening to but I have never heard anyone, of any political stripe, tell me “everything will be fine after the midterms”.

The US was never a democracy.

Of course America is a democracy. A flawed, and corruptible, and racist, democracy. Why do you think the right wing has to maintain such an enormous propaganda machine? Why do you think Republicans are clutching their pearls over the Iran war, and the spike in gas prices? It’s because they need votes. They need votes because they don’t have full control of the government apparatus, yet. That’s why they’re freaking out about the midterms, because they still don’t have their power fully cemented.

Yes, the supreme court is corrupted by the moneyed class. So are the lower courts, so is the congress, so is the executive. The same is true for state and local governments at every level. What about that makes it not a democracy? What democracy hasn’t had their institutions challenged, their power threatened, by the powerful? Of course they will try. They’ve been trying to hoard and amass power since day one, and when one falls, another power-hungry would-be tyrant will be next in line to try to seize more than their share. We do our best to stop them, sometimes more successfully than others. That’s democracy.

That’s true, maybe “Yet Another Discourse Alternative”? Discussion Alternative? I just like the idea of a chat platform whose acronym is YADA.