Nobody who is mad at this situation thinks that taking inspiration, riffing on, or referencing other people’s work is the problem when a human being does it. When a person writes, there is intention behind it.

The issue is when a business, owned by those people you think ‘demonised’ inspiration, take the works of authors and mulch them into something they lovingly named “The Pile”, in order to create derivative slop off the backs of creatives.

When you, as a “professional”, ask AI to write you a novel, who is being inspired? Who is making the connections between themes? Who is carefully crafting the text to pay loving reference to another authors work? Not you. Not the algorithm that is guessing what word to shit out next based on math.

These businesses have tricked you into thinking that what they are doing is noble.

No I don’t, but we’re not talking about a single copy of one book, and it is grovellingly insidious to imply that we are.

We are talking about a company taking the work of an author, of thousands of authors, and using it as the backbone of a machine that’s goal is to make those authors obsolete.

When the people who own the slop-machine are making millions of dollars off the back of stolen works, they can very much afford to pay those authors. If you can’t afford to run your business without STEALING, then your business is a pile of flaming shit that deserves to fail.

You’re right, each of the 5 million books’ authors should agree to less payment for their work, to make the poor criminals feel better.

If I steal $100 from a thousand people and spend it all on hookers and blow, do I get out of paying that back because I don’t have the funds? Should the victims agree to get $20 back instead because that’s more within my budget?

You’re right Bernie! But how are you, I, or anyone else going to stop him? I mean, somebody’s gotta do it…

Who has the time and hate to render their fellow humans like this? Grow up and get a life.

There have been a few in here, but the real “hear me out”s are Few and far between.

Someone mentioned Hexxus from Fern Gully (a tar monster voiced by Tim Curry), or the Hydra from Hercules.

I still think it holds true that men’s HMOs are conventionally attractive women (Jessica Rabbit, Tinkerbell, Gadget). Women’s HMOs are things like The Brave Little Toaster; the dog monster from The Thing; and the abstract concept of ennui.

Is DuckDuckGo still the best alternative at this point, or has Bing been toiling away in the dark to improve itself?

It baffles me how wholly some people are just accepting the complete erosion of the internet. I have lecturers at university, so theoretically educated people, who tell us point blank to plug any questions we have about weekly topics into ChatGPT. The respect I have for these teachers and their content is less than zero at this point.

When I saw the reveal trailer and the joycons were sliding around on their sides I didn’t even recognise that they were implying mouse-mode until people in the comments started losing their minds.

All I could think was “my massive hands are never going to be able to use that joycon as a mouse comfortably”. This patent does not make me feel any more confident that j won’t have constant hand cramps with this thing.

FYI

“ They also said they don’t know if browsers such as Firefox are affected because they weren’t tested in the research.”

Seems you should be fine if you follow the usual protocols though: don’t open suspicious links, check urls, that sort of thing. I expect a frantic phone call from my mother-in-law who has an iPhone 8 any minute now…

If you think Elon is being honest about ‘breaking even’, you haven’t been paying attention. Twitter is in the hole, and he’s lying through his fascist little teeth to either save face, or manipulate some sort of upcoming move.

People will remain subscribed because a $2 increase every few months doesn’t feel as bad as a $30 increase in one go.

Frogs in boiling water and all that…

Okay then, that was always allowed…

Light as a feather, but no man can hold me for long.

Amazing. I can finally find out exactly what that nurse is yelling about while she gets railed by the local basketball team.

And yet here you are, starting a discussion on actual mental issues.

Work any phone helpdesk job and you will be threatened six ways to Sunday by people who are upset over the most minor things.

Yes this incident came after very prominent consequences for an insurer in the US, but I would be hard pressed to believe that someone who works for a company that denies people lifesaving healthcare hasn’t heard worse.

To be fair, Australia doesn’t have it much better with misinformation. If a Labor (left-ish) government is in power, you can bet your arse that the papers will have a front page article every week on some screw up, no matter how minor. But when the Liberals (right) get in… crickets.

I would love some third party, but I fear that faith in any body like that is wearing thin. When the UN won’t stand up to its war-mongering members, I don’t think some org telling Trump not to call Biden a pedo is going to achieve much.

Better CEOs than the school children it’s been thus far.

We’ve been seeing ‘first dominoes’ fall for over a decade now. I’m at the point where I don’t think it’s going to be as big and flashy as people hope. If electing a genocidal rapist as president TWICE didn’t stir the world into action, I don’t think the pitiful death of some no-name ceo is going to do it. Things like this will keep happening, but in the grand scheme, nothing is going to change.