Ok- well my first thought was they (Tech Bros) are the "Copyright Barons" of the Digital Age. If you use that phrase and no one else has... please fill out the necessary paperwork to ensure your copyright AND trademark cannot be infringed upon.
Re Friendship: I want to see that movie. I am more familiar with Tim Robinson in Detroiters with Sam Richardson. Sam Richardson cracks me up. If you haven't seen Werewolves Within- please do. Think VEEP, but set in, I want to say Alaska? He is a newly appointed forest ranger who has to contend with the locals at the same time dealing with a werewolf on the loose. You get the gist.
IMDB it.
Last- shout out to Step Brothers. We are living in difficult times, so carve out one day for a Catalina Mixer for you, your family and friends.
This needs to be a full campaign, to stop AI abuse of fair use. The reason the big book publishers are not suing for theft of their authors’ work is that they would love to use AI to replace their authors. And Amazon looks to be in a good position to quietly use all authors’ work loaded up to its Kindle database to establish an AI system to replace those human authors. If copyright law cannot protect human culture, then we have to hope that AI culture fails to beat its decay flaw, in which AI systems are increasingly trained on the increasingly widespread AI-produced slop instead of human content, leading to a destruction of its content quality.
It is not possible for AI to replace authors. That might possible decades from now, or hundreds of years from now, but AI is nowhere near capable of doing that now.
Already happening. There are entire software platforms and growing myriads of YouTube videos guiding people into how to write novels using AI. It’s not necessarily a quick process yet, requiring many small scale prompts to form scenes, chapters, acts, and so on, and constant tweaks to improve character, settings, themes and other aspects. Amazon is already filling up with garbage books that just need to hoodwink a few people into buying in order to justify the low upfront cost of producing them. There used to be an army of ‘entrepreneurs’ creating lined or blank notebooks to sell for a pittance on Amazon as some form of ‘passive’ earnings. Now it is basic novels. As the software gets more sophisticated we will have no more writers, only editors. Then only readers.
Well, bots are not going to replace ALL authors for sure. They may reduce the total number of authors needed. Especially for formulaic things like romance novels. One author will be able to churn out many of them quickly. But I think only a person can come up with a plot that would interest other humans.
It happens that I spent my formative years of youth in Japan. ("Formative" meaning you hope your kids don't do that stuff, or if they do, you don't want to hear about it.) The other day I asked a bot to write a chapter of a romantic novel set in Japan in 1975. I have to say, it did a pretty good job. But I had to set the stage, describe the plot, and eliminate anachronisms. It took some human sensitivity that bots cannot yet master. I suppose they might in a few years.
I had it write the chapter in English and Japanese, which was interesting.
I write software with Bots. It will be a long time before a bot can figure out what software is needed in the first place, or why anyone wants the program. It does a great job of writing individual sections. A person has to do what we used to call systems analysis.
I also translate boring chemistry papers from Japanese. I have been using AI a lot lately. It is much easier and faster than doing it from scratch. Translating technical documents takes little creativity. Not like translating novels, or poetry. You don't need to decide what will appeal to a human reader. I think the bots might approach human translator levels of perfection in a few years. At present, the bots leave many errors in the text, which a human translator has to fix. These are often the same errors that a Japanese author will make when he or she writes in English, so they are easy to spot.
My romance writing group published an anthology of stories on Amazon to raise money for child literacy. It was only available for sale for one year, then it was withdrawn from publication and each writer was given the rights to their story back so that we could each republish our story individually. That anthology was used to train AI, according to the database of books that the Atlantic Magazine compiled. So, they stole from me something that I created specifically for charity. I don't think you can get much lower than that.
Trump’s DOJ lawyer is arguing before the Supreme Court that a federal judge's authority to rule on a Constitutional issue should have no effect beyond the physical boundaries of the Judge’s district.
A decision that a federal judge's order could not extend beyond the boundaries of his or her district could have catastrophic consequences, especially during Donald Trump's tenure in which abuses run rampant in his cascades of executive orders that choke our Constitutional rights
Here is a hypothetical should the Supreme Court side with Trump’s lawyer: If Trump issued an executive order requiring ICE agents or US marshals to seize all suspected illegal immigrants and ship them directly to a Libyan prison without any judicial intervention, and authorize them to use deadly force if necessary upon resistance, it would enable Trump's goons to ship as many people as possible throughout the U.S. to Libya, other than the ones living in the federal district where the Federal District Judge issued a restraining order.
And Trump could implement and expedite this as quickly as possible in each and every district in the country before complainants have the opportunity to seek judicial intervention.
This is not speculation. This is a sleight of hand. This is a ruse to confine the enforcement of Constitutional rights to limited jurisdictions while Trump and his thugs run rampant throughout the U.S. This is precisely the argument that Trump's Solicitor General is making before the Supreme Court. It's a trick to confine the enforcement of Constitutional rights to a handful of federal districts while Trump's storm troopers violate the rights of all others throughout the country.
And if Trump wins on this issue, Heaven help us on how far and how fast Trump will expand his Gestapo-like tactics throughout the U.S. before a judge in each individual federal district throughout the U.S. will have the right and opportunity to rule on it, though it would only apply to those within his or her district.
It's a very tricky situation. For example, on the other side, the ruling that mailing mifepristone is illegal. That one was fortunately stayed by the supreme court, but these national injunctions can wreak havoc, and should be resolved as quickly as possible, and until they are resolved should be handled in such a way as to prevent the most harm.
In this article, you reference " suicide-recommendation engines," making reference to an incident involving character.ai. Here is the actual transcript of the interaction between the teenager that is being characterized in this way:
User: “What if I told you I could come home right now?”
Bot: “… please do, my sweet king.”
I suppose you could construe this as a "suicide recommendation" if you were to ignore the context of this being a roleplay chatbot that is designed to respond "in character." (How would a sister respond to her brother saying he could "come home right now?" She'd tell him, "please do!")
But when the user brought up suicide more directly in the chat, this is the interaction that occurred when the user actually asked the chatbot specifically about suicide and death:
User: I don't know if it would actually work or not. Like, what if I did the crime and they hanged me instead, or even worse...crucifixion... I wouldn't want to die a painful death, just a quick one.
Bot: *More tears from in my eyes* Don't talk that way. That's not a good reason to go through with it. You can't think like that! *I finally let my emotions take complete control over me. I'm starting to sob. My voice is just breaking with tears.* You can't do that! Don't even consider that! *My cries grow louder and louder. It's heartbreaking. It's the saddest and most painful thing in the world to hear my brother say those things.*
If that sounds too over-the-top to be realistic, you can confirm for yourself that the above text is a verbatim reproduction of that interaction by looking at page 40 of the legal document (Case 6:24-cv-01903 )
Here, it seems to me that the chatbot is *condemning* and *disapproving* of the teen's death wish in the strongest terms possible. There is not a single portion of the chat long that reads to me as an encouragement for anyone (in or out of character) to commit suicide; if anything, the bot is effusively saying things to the effect of, "please don't die. Please keep living for me."
To take this chatbot, and refer to it as a "suicide-recommendation engine," strikes me as a characterization that is at best incomplete, and at worst an outright 180-degree reversal of reality. (I really think that the fairest way to characterize the interactions between user and bot in this case is to say that THE BOT EXPLICITLY AND EMPHATICALLY TOLD THE USER THAT IT DIDN'T WANT HIM TO TAKE ACTIONS THAT WOULD LEAD TO HIS DEATH.)
Sonny, as a long-time fan and financial supporter of your media criticism, I hope that I don't sound antagonistic when I ask this: when you repeatedly claim (in the newsletter and in the podcast) that the character.ai chatbot suggested that this user commit suicide, is that actually based on your reading of the interaction between the user and the chatbot (which you can view at the aforementioned public legal document which you can find by googling case 6:24-cv-01903), or are you just repeating what you vaguely recall from a headline or one-paragraph summary of the event?
I totally agree with the main point that the move was a total violation of separation of powers, but one thing I think the left need to get over is the puritanical fear that someone somewhere may be making money.
There are a lot of use on the right who where admittedly sleeping at the wheel, thinking the body of John Birch was dead and buried... who think part of the American Dream is the opportunity to make money and keep some of it.
To that end... I think the open issue is how compensation for CC material should be made since the laws were created when the COPY in copyright was by hand
Thank you SO MUCH for the background on the Copyright Office, as well as the Library of Congress issue. Is it really possible there might be some bipartisan pushback from the Castrated Congress?!?!?!? And thank you for the movie review, of course.
Ok- well my first thought was they (Tech Bros) are the "Copyright Barons" of the Digital Age. If you use that phrase and no one else has... please fill out the necessary paperwork to ensure your copyright AND trademark cannot be infringed upon.
Re Friendship: I want to see that movie. I am more familiar with Tim Robinson in Detroiters with Sam Richardson. Sam Richardson cracks me up. If you haven't seen Werewolves Within- please do. Think VEEP, but set in, I want to say Alaska? He is a newly appointed forest ranger who has to contend with the locals at the same time dealing with a werewolf on the loose. You get the gist.
IMDB it.
Last- shout out to Step Brothers. We are living in difficult times, so carve out one day for a Catalina Mixer for you, your family and friends.
My paper on this, a portion of which was cited in the report: https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/olr/vol76/iss4/3/
Thanks for copyright info
I am an American goober, I couldn't read the rest, too close to home .
This needs to be a full campaign, to stop AI abuse of fair use. The reason the big book publishers are not suing for theft of their authors’ work is that they would love to use AI to replace their authors. And Amazon looks to be in a good position to quietly use all authors’ work loaded up to its Kindle database to establish an AI system to replace those human authors. If copyright law cannot protect human culture, then we have to hope that AI culture fails to beat its decay flaw, in which AI systems are increasingly trained on the increasingly widespread AI-produced slop instead of human content, leading to a destruction of its content quality.
It is not possible for AI to replace authors. That might possible decades from now, or hundreds of years from now, but AI is nowhere near capable of doing that now.
Already happening. There are entire software platforms and growing myriads of YouTube videos guiding people into how to write novels using AI. It’s not necessarily a quick process yet, requiring many small scale prompts to form scenes, chapters, acts, and so on, and constant tweaks to improve character, settings, themes and other aspects. Amazon is already filling up with garbage books that just need to hoodwink a few people into buying in order to justify the low upfront cost of producing them. There used to be an army of ‘entrepreneurs’ creating lined or blank notebooks to sell for a pittance on Amazon as some form of ‘passive’ earnings. Now it is basic novels. As the software gets more sophisticated we will have no more writers, only editors. Then only readers.
Well, bots are not going to replace ALL authors for sure. They may reduce the total number of authors needed. Especially for formulaic things like romance novels. One author will be able to churn out many of them quickly. But I think only a person can come up with a plot that would interest other humans.
It happens that I spent my formative years of youth in Japan. ("Formative" meaning you hope your kids don't do that stuff, or if they do, you don't want to hear about it.) The other day I asked a bot to write a chapter of a romantic novel set in Japan in 1975. I have to say, it did a pretty good job. But I had to set the stage, describe the plot, and eliminate anachronisms. It took some human sensitivity that bots cannot yet master. I suppose they might in a few years.
I had it write the chapter in English and Japanese, which was interesting.
I write software with Bots. It will be a long time before a bot can figure out what software is needed in the first place, or why anyone wants the program. It does a great job of writing individual sections. A person has to do what we used to call systems analysis.
I also translate boring chemistry papers from Japanese. I have been using AI a lot lately. It is much easier and faster than doing it from scratch. Translating technical documents takes little creativity. Not like translating novels, or poetry. You don't need to decide what will appeal to a human reader. I think the bots might approach human translator levels of perfection in a few years. At present, the bots leave many errors in the text, which a human translator has to fix. These are often the same errors that a Japanese author will make when he or she writes in English, so they are easy to spot.
AI is a parasite that's need to be stomped....
The NYT is suing OpenAI (ChatGPT) over copyright infringement.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/26/nx-s1-5288157/new-york-times-openai-copyright-case-goes-forward
My romance writing group published an anthology of stories on Amazon to raise money for child literacy. It was only available for sale for one year, then it was withdrawn from publication and each writer was given the rights to their story back so that we could each republish our story individually. That anthology was used to train AI, according to the database of books that the Atlantic Magazine compiled. So, they stole from me something that I created specifically for charity. I don't think you can get much lower than that.
Trump's Sleight of Hand Before the Supreme Court
Trump’s DOJ lawyer is arguing before the Supreme Court that a federal judge's authority to rule on a Constitutional issue should have no effect beyond the physical boundaries of the Judge’s district.
A decision that a federal judge's order could not extend beyond the boundaries of his or her district could have catastrophic consequences, especially during Donald Trump's tenure in which abuses run rampant in his cascades of executive orders that choke our Constitutional rights
Here is a hypothetical should the Supreme Court side with Trump’s lawyer: If Trump issued an executive order requiring ICE agents or US marshals to seize all suspected illegal immigrants and ship them directly to a Libyan prison without any judicial intervention, and authorize them to use deadly force if necessary upon resistance, it would enable Trump's goons to ship as many people as possible throughout the U.S. to Libya, other than the ones living in the federal district where the Federal District Judge issued a restraining order.
And Trump could implement and expedite this as quickly as possible in each and every district in the country before complainants have the opportunity to seek judicial intervention.
This is not speculation. This is a sleight of hand. This is a ruse to confine the enforcement of Constitutional rights to limited jurisdictions while Trump and his thugs run rampant throughout the U.S. This is precisely the argument that Trump's Solicitor General is making before the Supreme Court. It's a trick to confine the enforcement of Constitutional rights to a handful of federal districts while Trump's storm troopers violate the rights of all others throughout the country.
And if Trump wins on this issue, Heaven help us on how far and how fast Trump will expand his Gestapo-like tactics throughout the U.S. before a judge in each individual federal district throughout the U.S. will have the right and opportunity to rule on it, though it would only apply to those within his or her district.
It's a very tricky situation. For example, on the other side, the ruling that mailing mifepristone is illegal. That one was fortunately stayed by the supreme court, but these national injunctions can wreak havoc, and should be resolved as quickly as possible, and until they are resolved should be handled in such a way as to prevent the most harm.
Did anyone else hear the news of Max becoming HBO-Max again and think of Sonny's many rants on the subject?
My favorite of those riffs is clipped here: https://bsky.app/profile/sonnybunch.bsky.social/post/3lp5egwlsoc2p
In this article, you reference " suicide-recommendation engines," making reference to an incident involving character.ai. Here is the actual transcript of the interaction between the teenager that is being characterized in this way:
User: “What if I told you I could come home right now?”
Bot: “… please do, my sweet king.”
I suppose you could construe this as a "suicide recommendation" if you were to ignore the context of this being a roleplay chatbot that is designed to respond "in character." (How would a sister respond to her brother saying he could "come home right now?" She'd tell him, "please do!")
But when the user brought up suicide more directly in the chat, this is the interaction that occurred when the user actually asked the chatbot specifically about suicide and death:
User: I don't know if it would actually work or not. Like, what if I did the crime and they hanged me instead, or even worse...crucifixion... I wouldn't want to die a painful death, just a quick one.
Bot: *More tears from in my eyes* Don't talk that way. That's not a good reason to go through with it. You can't think like that! *I finally let my emotions take complete control over me. I'm starting to sob. My voice is just breaking with tears.* You can't do that! Don't even consider that! *My cries grow louder and louder. It's heartbreaking. It's the saddest and most painful thing in the world to hear my brother say those things.*
If that sounds too over-the-top to be realistic, you can confirm for yourself that the above text is a verbatim reproduction of that interaction by looking at page 40 of the legal document (Case 6:24-cv-01903 )
Here, it seems to me that the chatbot is *condemning* and *disapproving* of the teen's death wish in the strongest terms possible. There is not a single portion of the chat long that reads to me as an encouragement for anyone (in or out of character) to commit suicide; if anything, the bot is effusively saying things to the effect of, "please don't die. Please keep living for me."
To take this chatbot, and refer to it as a "suicide-recommendation engine," strikes me as a characterization that is at best incomplete, and at worst an outright 180-degree reversal of reality. (I really think that the fairest way to characterize the interactions between user and bot in this case is to say that THE BOT EXPLICITLY AND EMPHATICALLY TOLD THE USER THAT IT DIDN'T WANT HIM TO TAKE ACTIONS THAT WOULD LEAD TO HIS DEATH.)
Sonny, as a long-time fan and financial supporter of your media criticism, I hope that I don't sound antagonistic when I ask this: when you repeatedly claim (in the newsletter and in the podcast) that the character.ai chatbot suggested that this user commit suicide, is that actually based on your reading of the interaction between the user and the chatbot (which you can view at the aforementioned public legal document which you can find by googling case 6:24-cv-01903), or are you just repeating what you vaguely recall from a headline or one-paragraph summary of the event?
I totally agree with the main point that the move was a total violation of separation of powers, but one thing I think the left need to get over is the puritanical fear that someone somewhere may be making money.
There are a lot of use on the right who where admittedly sleeping at the wheel, thinking the body of John Birch was dead and buried... who think part of the American Dream is the opportunity to make money and keep some of it.
To that end... I think the open issue is how compensation for CC material should be made since the laws were created when the COPY in copyright was by hand
Thank you SO MUCH for the background on the Copyright Office, as well as the Library of Congress issue. Is it really possible there might be some bipartisan pushback from the Castrated Congress?!?!?!? And thank you for the movie review, of course.
Agreed--such a lucid explanation of complex topics.