side note, but I freaking love Machine of Death. what a cool book that came into existence in such a weird way

Can AI companies legally ingest copyrighted materials found on the internet to train their models, and use them to pump out commercial products that they then profit from? Or, as the tech companies claim, does generative AI output constitute fair use?

This is kind of the central issue to me honestly. I’m not a lawyer, just a (non-professional) artist, but it seems to me like “using artistic works without permission of the original creators in order to create commercial content that directly competes with and destroys the market for the original work” is extremely not fair use. In fact it’s kind of a prototypically unfair use.

Meanwhile Midjourney and OpenAI are over here like “uhh, no copyright infringement intended!!!” as though “fair use” is a magic word you say that makes the thing you’re doing suddenly okay. They don’t seem to have very solid arguments justifying them other than “AI learns like a person!” (false) and “well google books did something that’s not really the same at all that one time”.

I dunno, I know that legally we don’t know which way this is going to go, because the ai people presumably have very good lawyers, but something about the way everyone seems to frame this as “oh, both sides have good points! who will turn out to be right in the end!” really bugs me for some reason. Like, it seems to me that there’s a notable asymmetry here!

Not even – it’s a simplified Civilization clone for mobile. (It actually sounds like a pretty neat little game, but, uh, chess it is not!)

My main thought reading through this whole thing was like, “okay, in a world where the rationalists weren’t closely tied to the neoreactionaries, and the effective altruists weren’t known by the public mostly for whitewashing the image of a guy who stole a bunch of people’s money, and libertarians and right-wingers were supported by the mainstream consensus, I guess David Gerard would be pretty bad for saying those things about them. Buuuut…”

Oh my god, I can’t stop laughing out loud at “women evolved small heads because they kept falling over and hitting their big heads on rocks,” based on the fact that his sister hit her head when she was younger. What’s his explanation for why men didn’t do this then?? Absolutely next-level moon logic I love it so much

posts you can hear

Well, if this guy’s quite confident, then I’m sure it’ll all pan out in the end. How hard could symbolic reasoning be, really? Incidentally, I’ve been in a coma since 1970

Text in AI-generated images will never not be funny to me. N the most n’tural hnertis indeed.

First: our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — despite what you may have heard

Man, you invite one Nazi to speak at your conference and suddenly you’re “the guys who invited a Nazi to speak at their conference.” How is that fair? :-(

It is always kind of bewildering to me though. Like, has no one ever explained to these people the health problems that highly-bred dogs tend to have? Have they never heard of ‘hybrid vigor’ or issues with smaller gene pools making populations more susceptible to disease? Were they just asleep during biology 101? I don’t get how people who think they’re so smart can have failed to consider even the most basic issues with planning to turn humanity into Gros Michel bananas.

Except it’s not really being automated out of our lives, is it? I find it hard to imagine how increasing the rate at which bullshit can be produced leads to a world with less bullshit in it.

Not gonna lie, the world would probably be better off if guys like Roko just started having sex with sexbots instead of real women

RationalWiki is an index maintained by the Rationalist community

Lies and slander! I get why he’d assume this based on the name, but it would be pretty funny if the rationalists were responsible for the rational wiki articles on Yudkowsky et al, since iirc they’re pretty scathing

this reads like someone googled a list of gen z slang and then threw it in a blender with a bunch of weird race-science memes. who is this for

I think the only acceptable response to whoever is responsible for it is a highly aggressive “touch grass”

deleted by creator

Look, you gotta forgive this guy for coming up with an insane theory that doesn’t make sense. After all, his brain was poisoned by testosterone, so his thinking skills have atrophied. An XXL hat size can only do so much, you know.

They need the rationalist musical cannons for the upcoming performance of the Rationalist 1812 Overture

If twitter did get put on the blockchain after Elon bought it, it really would be “X on blockchain”… ba dum tshh

[Time Cube] has a high-IQ mystique about it: if you don’t get it, maybe it’s because your IQ is too low. The [website] itself is dense with insights, especially the first part. It uses quite a lot of nonstandard terminology (partially because the author is outside the normal academic system), having few citations relative to most academic works. The work is incredibly ambitious, attempting to rebase philosophical metaphysics on a new unified foundation. As a short work, it can’t fully deliver on this ambition; it can provide a “seed” of a philosophical research program aimed at understanding the world, but few implications are drawn out.

He should’ve stuck with it