dowsil-drinker

[dowsil-drinker]

Oman Cat Stamp Collection (1973)

[dowsil-drinker]

Yuzu Kato: Borrowing from the Tiger's Majesty (2022)

[dowsil-drinker]

[dowsil-drinker]

[dowsil-drinker]

John Byrne, 1940-2023

Lionel, n/d, oil on board, 27.6x19.7 cm

[dowsil-drinker]

From: “Sibyllans Hemligheter [« Sibyl’s Secrets: Practical Prophecy and Magical Art Book »]”

[dowsil-drinker]

I wish there was a good pop sci book abiut like...antenna and circuit design. Or yknow "dynamic electromagnetics" more generally. I basically just did electrostatics and some stuff with like simple moving charges. closest thing I think of is hot molecules cold . electrons but I was reading the book and it's mostly just an into to PDE's and Fourier analysis? I've done thst stuff. I think I know the necessary physics to understand circuit and antenna stuff but it's hard to find explainers that aren't super dense and boring

[dowsil-drinker]

EDIT: To be clear what this means is: the temperature gets raised by 1°C for every vote to raise it and lowered by 1°C for every vote to lower it

[dowsil-drinker]

[dowsil-drinker]

On that recent Disney Vs Midjourney court thing wrt AI, how strong do you think their case is in a purely legal sense, what do you think MJ's best defenses are, how likely is Disney to win, and how bad would the outcome be if they do win?

Oh sure, ask an easy one.

In a purely legal sense, this case is very questionable.

Scraping as fair use has already been established when it comes to text in legal cases, and infringement is based on publication, not inspiration. There's also the question of if Midjourney would be responsible for their users' creations under safe harbor provisions, or even basic understanding of what an art tool is. Adobe isn't responsible for the many, many illegal images its software is used to make, after all.

The best defense, I would say, is the fair use nature of dataset training and the very nature of transformative work, which is protected, requires the work-to-be-transformed is involved. Disney's basic approach of 'your AI knows who our characters are, so that proves you stole from us' would render fair use impossible.

I don't think its likely for Disney to win, but the problem with civil action is proof isn't needed, just convincing. Bad civil cases happen all the time, and produce case law. Which is what Disney is trying to do here.

If Disney wins, they'll have pulled off a coup of regulatory capture, basically ensuring that large media corporations can replace their staff with robots but that small creators will be limited to underpowered models to compete with them.

Worse, everything that is a 'smoking gun' when it comes to copyright infringement on Midjourney? That's fan art. All that "look how many copyrighted characters they're using-" applies to the frontpage of Deviantart or any given person's Tumblr feed more than to the featured page of Midjourney.

Every single website with user-generated content it chock full of copyright infringement because of fan art and fanfic, and fair use arguments are far harder to pull out for fan-works. The law won't distinguish between a human with a digital art package and a human with an AI art package, and any win Disney makes against MJ is a win against Artstation, Deviantart, Rule34.xxx, AO3, and basically everyone else.

"We get a slice of your cheese if enough of your users post our mouse" is not a rule you want in law.

And the rules won't be enforced by a court 9/10 times. Even if your individual work is plainly fair use, it's not going to matter to whatever image-based version of youtube's copyreich bots gets applied to Artstation and RedBubble to keep the site owners safe.

Even if you're right, you won't have the money to fight.

Heck, Adobe already spies on what you make to report you to the feds if you're doing a naughty, imagine it's internal watchdogs throwing up warnings when it detects you drawing Princess Jasmine and Ariel making out. That may sound nuts, but it's entirely viable.

And that's just one level of possible nightmare. If the judgement is broad enough, it could provide a legal pretext for pursuing copyright lawsuits over style and inspiration. Given how consolidated IP is, this means you're going to have several large cabals that can crush any new work that seems threatening, as there's bound to be something they can draw a connection to.

If you want to see how utterly stupid inspiration=theft is, check out when Harlan Ellison sued James Cameron over Terminator because Cameron was dumb enough to say he was inspired by Demon with a Glass Hand and Soldier from the Outer Limits.

Harlan was wrong on the merits, wrong ethically, and the case shouldn't have been entertained in the first place, but like I said, civil law isn't about facts. Cameron was honest about how two episodes of a show he saw as a kid gave him this completely different idea (the similarities are 'robot that looks like a guy with hand reveal' and 'time traveling soldier goes into a gun store and tries to buy future guns'), and he got unjustly sued for it.

If you ever wonder why writers only talk about their inspirations that are dead, that's why. Anything that strengthens the "what goes in" rather than the "what goes out" approach to IP is good for corps, bad for culture.

[dowsil-drinker]

[dowsil-drinker]

[dowsil-drinker]

uniflex advertisement in byte magazine, august 1981.

[dowsil-drinker]

The Hunter - Cats with Kills Taking a short nap in his trophy room, ‘The Hunter’ relives his greatest hunts in his dreams. 

[dowsil-drinker]

A coworker of mine found this truly bizarre presentation on the “30 year vision” of a huge multinational corporation, and it honestly reads like some kind of absurdist vaporwave shitpost. If you’d like to see the entire thing in all its original glory, you can find it here.

[dowsil-drinker]