Mark

Art/code. Curiosity, privacy, accessibility.

[Mark @heymark]

@ConceptualJames lmao go to bed James

[Mark @heymark]

@conorjrogers @lolDev3 I love how he's still running against Joe in 2024 like he ran against Obama and both (!) Clintons in 2020. Hope he keeps it up.

[Mark @heymark]

@costareports Maybe he can pick Tulsi Gabbard for his VP, since they're both so beloved by the base. 🙄

[Mark @heymark]

@FoxCahn Mandating Android in the name of privacy is one of the sillier things I've seen Musk say (and not for lack of competition).

[Mark @heymark]

@NeedToKnow_NTK BBC reports that it was a McDonald's banana milkshake, so I think the real question is why can't we have those in the US?

[Mark @heymark]

@EdAsante77 Still surrounding himself with the best people, I see. 😏

[Meredith Whittaker @mer__edith]

Great thread from Matt, an experts’ expert, on the vast (vast!) differences between Signal (gold standard for private comms) and Telegram (not private, not secure, but happy to market themselves that way) 👇👇👇

[Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex]

I’ve resigned from my role leading the Audio team at Stability AI, because I don’t agree with the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is ‘fair use’.

First off, I want to say that there are lots of people at Stability who are deeply thoughtful about these issues. I’m proud that we were able to launch a state-of-the-art AI music generation product trained on licensed training data, sharing the revenue from the model with rights-holders. I’m grateful to my many colleagues who worked on this with me and who supported our team, and particularly to Emad for giving us the opportunity to build and ship it. I’m thankful for my time at Stability, and in many ways I think they take a more nuanced view on this topic than some of their competitors.

But, despite this, I wasn’t able to change the prevailing opinion on fair use at the company.

This was made clear when the US Copyright Office recently invited public comments on generative AI and copyright, and Stability was one of many AI companies to respond. Stability’s 23-page submission included this on its opening page:

“We believe that Al development is an acceptable, transformative, and socially-beneficial use of existing content that is protected by fair use”.

For those unfamiliar with ‘fair use’, this claims that training an AI model on copyrighted works doesn’t infringe the copyright in those works, so it can be done without permission, and without payment. This is a position that is fairly standard across many of the large generative AI companies, and other big tech companies building these models — it’s far from a view that is unique to Stability. But it’s a position I disagree with.

I disagree because one of the factors affecting whether the act of copying is fair use, according to Congress, is “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”. Today’s generative AI models can clearly be used to create works that compete with the copyrighted works they are trained on. So I don’t see how using copyrighted works to train generative AI models of this nature can be considered fair use.

But setting aside the fair use argument for a moment — since ‘fair use’ wasn’t designed with generative AI in mind — training generative AI models in this way is, to me, wrong. Companies worth billions of dollars are, without permission, training generative AI models on creators’ works, which are then being used to create new content that in many cases can compete with the original works. I don’t see how this can be acceptable in a society that has set up the economics of the creative arts such that creators rely on copyright.

To be clear, I’m a supporter of generative AI. It will have many benefits — that’s why I’ve worked on it for 13 years. But I can only support generative AI that doesn’t exploit creators by training models — which may replace them — on their work without permission.

I’m sure I’m not the only person inside these generative AI companies who doesn’t think the claim of ‘fair use’ is fair to creators. I hope others will speak up, either internally or in public, so that companies realise that exploiting creators can’t be the long-term solution in generative AI.

[Justine Bateman @JustineBateman]

“We are not the users of #AI, we are the subjects of AI.”
Meredith Whittaker @mer__edith is one of the smartest people on #AI. Watch here, and follow her for more. https://t.co/co1C3lnHcy

[Mark @heymark]

@SarahTheHaider The point is that he wouldn't make a case for OR against something on the basis of it being natural. If that's the best argument one has for something, it's a weak one.

Also, people who deploy the argument from nature very much do use it in the sense he's objecting to.

[🔎Julia Evans🔍 @b0rk]

some people who make programming easier

(who am I missing?)

[Mark @heymark]

@p8stie lmao

[Mother Jones @MotherJones]

The right-wing Christian broadcaster was a bigoted loon—and the GOP embraced him. https://t.co/iy0J9DFuhQ

[EFF @EFF]

Digital rights don't disappear in the metaverse (or in "spatial computing"). Learn more: https://t.co/ZjMc1OvaMS

[Mark @heymark]

@parismarx A surreally backwards take. Apple clearly invested time, thought and money to reduce or eliminate the isolating effects common in other headsets—not only that, but they did so in both directions. Did you have this prewritten and just hit Send w/o understanding the product at all?

[Matt Deitke @mattdeitke]

Introducing Objaverse, a massive open dataset of text-paired 3D objects!

Nearly 1 million annotated 3D objects to pave the way to build incredible large-scale 3D generative models: 🧵👇

🤗 Hugging Face: https://t.co/bTWDd6JnIz
📝ArXiv: https://t.co/Qt1QirmGDN

#CVPR2023

[Eric Florenzano @ericflo]

Excited to open source this tool I’ve been working on, Tracky! It hooks into ARKit and captures everything it possibly can from an AR session (camera, depth, planes, etc.) Then there’s a Blender plugin that imports all that data, fully tracked, composited, completely auto set-up:

[Mark @heymark]

@ka11away Tables, unless you're reimplementing all of the underlying functionality (not just the appearance of a table) from scratch.

[Eric Wallace @Eric_Wallace_]

Models such as Stable Diffusion are trained on copyrighted, trademarked, private, and sensitive images.

Yet, our new paper shows that diffusion models memorize images from their training data and emit them at generation time.

Paper: https://t.co/LQuTtAskJ9

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