The difference between Gen AI and Sony v. Universal feels pretty substantial to me: VCRs did not require manufacturers to use any copyrighted material to develop and manufacture them. They only could potentially infringe copyright if the user captured a copyrighted signal and used it for commercial purposes.

If you read the title and the description of the article, it admittedly does make it sound like the studios are taking issue with copyrighted IPs being able to be generated. But the first paragraph of the body states that the problem is actually the usage of copyrighted works as training inputs:

The Content Overseas Distribution Association […] has issued a formal notice to OpenAI demanding that it stop using its members content to train its Sora 2 video generation tool without permission.

You compare Gen AI to “magic boxes”… but they’re not magic. They have to get their “knowledge” from somewhere. These AI tools are using many patterns far more subtle and complex than humans can recognize, and they aren’t storing the training inputs using them— it’s just used to strengthen connections within the neural net (afaik, as I’m not an ML developer). I think that’s why it’s so unregulated: how to you prove they used your content? And even so, they aren’t storing or outputting it directly. Could it fall under fair use?

Still, using copyrighted information in the creation of an invention has historically been considered infringement (I may not be using the correct terminology in this comparison, since maybe it’s more relevant to patent law), even if it didn’t end up in the invention— in software, for example, reverse engineers can’t legally rely on leaked source code to guide their development.

Also, using a VCR for personal use wouldn’t be a problem, which I’d say was a prominent use-case. And using it commercially wouldn’t involve any copyrighted material, unless the owner inputs any. Those aren’t the case with Gen AI: regardless of what you generate, non-commercially or commercially, the neural network was built using a majority of unauthorized, copyrighted content.

That said, copyright law functions largely to protect corporations anyways— an individual infringing the copyright of a corporation for personal or non-commercial use causes very little harm, but can usually be challenged and stopped. A corporation infringing copyright of an individual often can’t be stopped. Most individuals can’t even afford the legal fees, anyways.

For that reason, I’m glad to see companies taking legal action against OpenAI and other megacorps which are (IMO) infringing the copyright of individuals and corporations at this kind of a massive scale. Individuals certainly can’t stop it, but corporations may be able to get some justice or encourage more to be done to safeguard the technology.

Much damage is already done, though. E-waste and energy usage from machine learning have skyrocketed. Websites struggle to fight crawlers and lock down their APIs, both harming legit users. Non-consensual AI pornography is widely accessible. Many apps encourage people, including youth, to forgo genuine connection, both platonic and romantic, in exchange for AI chatbots. Also LLMs are fantastic misinformation machines. And we have automated arts, arguably the most “human” thing we can do, and put many artists out of work in doing so.

Whether the lack of safety guards is because of government incompetence, corruption, or is inherent to free-market capitalism, I’m not sure. Probably all of those reasons.

In summary, I disagree with you. I think companies training AI with unauthorized material are at fault. And personally, I think the entire AI industry as it exists currently is unethical.

sanitising parts to be in accordance with console standards or censoring the game, depending on who you ask.

It’s censorship, I don’t really see how one could argue (well) that it’s not. Self-censorship is still censorship, and seeing as the rationale for this change was specific platform policies, I think it’s absolutely fair to view the change happening on PC critically.

Honestly, the story and gameplay is still very dark and gritty, so I don’t think these changes would’ve had much backlash had they been this way from the start. Sometimes explicit content isn’t strictly required to get a point across, and can make a game less accessible, so I can understand games having a warning with a toggle.

But I’m very against total censorship. This reminds me a lot of when Superhot VR removed multiple scenes 4 years after the game’s release, because they were related to self-harm or suicide. Note that the game had a warning on launch as well as a toggle for this content. The linked article does a great deep dive on it, but imo I think the change really does affect the game. I got done with it (post-censorship) and did not see the hype. The game wasn’t very long and didn’t have many “whoa” moments. But shooting yourself… that’s something that you can only really do in VR, assuming it’s not coded in to a flatscreen game. And it would’ve fit into the game’s plot and themes very well.

Yo if they got marbles in there for my collection I’ll gonna go all night if I need to 😤

Wait, so let me get this straight… this AAA studio, which is a subsidiary of Tencent, which sells microtransactions for sometimes up to nearly $100, and which has incorporated gambling elements and predatory design in their games for years, has now allowed sponsorships with gambling companies in their esports scene? Color me surprised!

Oh, but it’s really for the benefit of the community and players, since it would happen anyways. And It’s certainly not primarily motivated by the huge profits it could rake in. Right. How noble of them.

I’m sure they have a history of treating their players and employees very well, too.

I haven’t heard of any such cases, but it is a smaller pool of users. Also, many desktop Linux users know more about using a computer than other operating system users, since it’s less common for Linux to come preinstalled. So that may affect it, too.

I imagine vulnerabilities with the Linux kernel or common utilities do apply to desktop users as well, which is a good reminder why staying up-to-date is important. But to my understanding, exploiting remotely would need a way of sending data to the target. And most desktop computers won’t have ports open to the internet for anyone like servers will.

I know that Wayland’s design does make it more difficult for a user-mode program to act maliciously, like as key-loggers or reading the clipboard.

Do they use much electricity/processing power when they are idle, or only really when they’re being queried?

Oh… I’ve never once considered that. But that’d make sense as to why it only recently picked it up— historically, the profanity filters were super easily bypassed. Maybe they tightened them up!

Just saw that today, photo shoot went wild

Here’s some other pics from it:

(And this without the caption):

It’s… all Ohio?

YOOO!!

I can’t wait to get home for this! I’m going to try to use VRR again too, see how it plays with that.

Same— my understanding is that there’s now no option to play without making one, which for some countries and territories is not even an option, making the game unplayable for them.

It’s finished!

The creator of the model replied below with links! I highly recommend this model if you need a stylus, it’s working great!

I should’ve been a bit more careful with where I put support material— one side of the bridge part is a bit bumpy. But it still works, so I can’t complain too much. Also, the bottom part where it connected to the raft is a bit rough. Might be worth lightly sanding it down so it’s a nicer finish when stashed.