Y’all I think this guy might actually be Steve Wozniak 👀

Wdym? I thought dropping Linux support through Proton fixed their hacker problem! /s

This teaser was damn intense at the game awards. I was very much like “what is even going on” and feeling pretty uncomfy. Incredibly gruesome, gorey and explicit.

And then it showed “Larian Studios” and I understood. What a reveal!

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.

As we already expected, NSFW games being a target was only ever going to be a first step. There's always more to it.

Well said. This is a good part of why I took issue with the initial removals on Steam… tbh I wasn’t effected, as I don’t tend to play porn games, and if I was going to, I’d probably avoid some of the extreme themes those original removals had.

In my opinion, adults should be able to consensually interact with whatever media they so care to! Still, it’s in a platform’s rights to choose what they allow or deny… so I appreciate Steam being so open to mature content.

But payment processors should have no say in what is allowed on a platform. As long as it’s legal, they shouldn’t be policing transactions at all!

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

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.

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.