My experience from watching lockpicking lawyer is that locks are just social niceties that tell others 'please don't go here' and have no real ability to stop anyone who doesn't care. Other than the owner who gets locked out by forgetting their own key of course.

AI art is derivative work, and claim that the authors of the works used to train the model shall have partial copyright over it too.

To me this is a potential can of worms. Humans can study and mimic art from other humans. It's a fundamental part of the learning process.

My understanding of modern AI image generation is that it's much more advanced than something like music sampling, it's not just an advanced cut and paste machine mashing art works together. How would you ever determine how much of a particular artists training data was used in the output?

If I create my own unique image in Jackson Pollock's style I own the entirety of that copyright, with Pollock owning nothing, no matter that everyone would recognize the resemblance in style. Why is AI different?

It feels like expanding the definition of derivative works is more likely to result in companies going after real artists who mimic or are otherwise inspired by Disney/Pixar/etc and attempting to claim partial copyright rather than protecting real artists from AI ripoffs.

A photographer does not give their camera prompts and then evaluate the output.

I understand what you're trying to say, but I think this will grow increasingly unclear as machines/software continue to play a larger and larger part of the creative process.

I think you can argue that photographers issue commands to their camera and then evaluate the output. Modern digital cameras have made photography almost a statistical exercise rather than a careful creative process. Photographers take hundreds and hundreds of shots and then evaluate which one was best.

Also, AI isn't some binary on/off. Most major software will begin incorporating AI assistant tools that will further muddy the waters. Is something AI generated if the artist added an extra inch of canvas to a photograph using photoshops new generative fill function so that the subject was better centered in the frame?

Companies aren't run to earn profit based on goods and services generated anymore. They are investment vehicles for wealthy VC to use and abuse until they run them into the ground while they jump to the next disposable company. Someday this will result in no effective company existing anymore, but the investors don't care.

If governments were actually functioning they'd recognize this danger and crack down on this behavior because it weakens the country as a whole, but most of the politicians are already bought and paid for.

Almost like voting with your wallet doesn't actually work. Or only works in same way 'communism' and 'well regulated free market capitalism' concepts work... in theory only.

It opens a crack to do it again. And again and again. If it didn't hurt them they wouldn't fight it so hard. But I do agree we should be trying for something more comprehensive. That said, I don't think the country is currently capable of doing something like that. We're too broken.

Exactly. I'm tired of more and more of my life being decided by boardroom execs instead of elected officials. Why are we trying to privatize ethical decision making? Government officials may be only barely accountable, but at least that's more than a private company. And don't even get me started on 'voting with your wallet'. I feel like that phrase is going to be as ridiculed by later generations as we ridicule 'trickle down economics'.

To me, going after oblique methods (like shutting off basic utilities) just to deal with criminal behavior represents a failure of the system. And the response to that failure shouldn't be to make these hacky workarounds more accessible, but rather should be addressing the core problems in the first place. We shouldn't be lobbying to shut off rapists power and water anymore than we should be trying to self sabotage our Internet infrastructure to deal with our rampant hate speech issues. Instead we should focus on actually addressing these issues by proper enforcement of laws we already have (which is often the sole issue), clarifying and updating where appropriate and developing responsive and auditable methods of problematic speech. In a way that isn't totally up how one CEO feels that day.

Why are we so quick to relinquish control of our digital lives to the very corporations we claim to hate?

Not sure about 'eye strain' or sleep quality it whatever, but the lower blue light feels more comfortable to me, which is all I really wanted. I don't actually care about any quantitative health benefits that may or may not exist.

I mean tears of the kingdom make $700 million + and Diablo Immortal made 525 million in it's first year despite being almost universally rebuked online. Really seems like micro transactions have a really solid, if maybe not top tier return. Lots of companies try to make something like Horizon Zero Dawn and it totally flops instead.

Sort of. Mostly this is just what happens when you build a platform that allows basically anyone to sell something on it. Local businesses have limited space, so necessarily they needed to limit product to trusted brands/partners/publishers.

Amazon has actually made it possible for self publishing to exist. There are a lot of successful authors now that never would have made it in the old 'local bookstore buys books from publishing house' paradigm.

But this of course has also opened the floodgates for scammers which utilize those same indie-friendly options to try to exploit people.

I think the issues are a little more nuanced than just 'local business good, Amazon bad'. Not that I think Amazon is good, I just think there are real, valid reasons why small bookstores (and their large book publishers) had problems.

As an RTS player who only ever plays for the story and does not care about multiplayer at all, new RTS games with a decent story and gameplay are kind of thin on the ground these days.

I can't even play C&C RA2 anymore because I can't get it to run on my PC. Tried several guides, but it refuses to run properly.

Wonder how they plant/harvest. Seems like the panels would block a tractor