The insistence on electoral districts.

You get that across the English-speaking world, though. The really weird thing is that even people who see the problem want to keep the districts and argue for non-solutions like ranked-choice voting.

Centuries ago, it made sense. Communities chose one of their own to argue for their interests in front of the king. Which communities had the privilege? Obviously that’s up to the king to decide. Before modern communication tech, it also made sense that communities would be defined by geography.

Little of that makes sense anymore. When their candidate loses, people don’t feel like the 2nd best guy is representing them. They feel disenfranchised.

It used to be, in the US, that minorities - specifically African Americans - were denied representation. Today, census data is used to draw districts dominated by minority ethnic groups so that they can send one of their own to congress. This might not be a good thing, because candidates elsewhere do not have to appeal to these minorities or take their interests into account. Minorities that are not geographically concentrated - eg LGBTQ - cannot gain representation that way.

The process is entirely top-down and undemocratic. Of course, it is gamed.

Aside from that, the mere fact that representation is geography based influences which issues dominate. The more likely you are to move before the next election, the less your interests matter. That goes for both parties. But you can also see a pronounced urban/rural divide in party preference. Rural vs urban determines interests and opinions in very basic ways. Say, guns: High-population density makes them a dangerous threat and not much else. In the country, they are a tool for hunting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU8VPQsTqFU

The FTC under Biden has begun to push back against tech monopolies.

Maybe you could call it recoupment but it doesn’t have quite the same ring. It’s not quite the same thing, either.

You could also talk about coercive monopolies but that doesn’t mean exactly the same thing.

If the same user can generate the same input, it will result in the same hash.

Yes, if. I don’t know if you can guarantee that. It’s all fun and games as long as you’re doing English. In other languages, you get characters that can be encoded in more than 1 way. User at home has a localized keyboard with a dedicated key for such a character. User travels across the border and has a different language keyboard and uses a different way to create the character. Euro problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence

Byte length of the character is irrelevant as long as you’re not doing something ridiculous like intentionally parsing your input in binary and blithely assuming that every character must be 8 bits in length.

There is always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn’t get the word.

• John F. Kennedy

You should accept Unicode; if doing so, you must count each code as one char.

Hmm. I wonder about this one. Different ways to encode the same character. Different ways to calculate the length. No obvious max byte size.

I think, for a lot of people, technology has come to mean a few websites, or companies.

There are a few lemmy communities dedicated to AI, but they are very inactive. Basically, I’d have to send you to Reddit.

can exercising one’s agency over their body really be considered “rent-seeking”?

First of all, I am not impressed by this kind of emotional manipulation. You are talking about exercising agency, power, over other people’s bodies. If someone, whether a VFX artist or a hobbyist, would use a likeness without a license, you want them stopped. At the end of the day that means that LEOs will use physical force. You may not think of something like copyright being enforced through physical force, but that is what happens if someone steadfastly refuses to pay fines or damages.

Enforcing intellectual property, like a likeness right, means ultimately exercising power over other people’s bodies. The body whose likeness it is, may not be involved at all. In the typical case of a Hollywood star, they would be completely unaware of what the enforcers are doing.

Rent-seeking is an economics term. Rent-seeking is as rent-seeking does. You may feel that society - the common people -have to suffer for “justice”, like people were expected to suffer for the diving rights of kings. But you can’t expect people not to remark the negative consequences. Well, I guess if I were living in such a monarchy, subject to the divine right of a king, I would be quite circumspect. I wouldn’t want to be tortured or imprisoned, after all. And yet it moves.

Usually, rent-seeking involves property, and yet the right to own property is internationally recognized as a human right.

to alienate workers from their labor and exploit them.

We’re probably not on the same page regarding terminology. This sounds like a Karl Marx idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx’s_theory_of_alienation

Obviously that’s not what you mean. I guess I’m just surprised to see these hints of leftism mixed in with conservative economics.

SAG-AFTRA

…is fundamentally a conservative organization. It’s no coincidence that Ronald Reagan was president of SAG, before becoming president of the US. They will favor the in-group over the out-group and the top over everyone at the bottom. That’s what the doctrines you are repeating are designed for.

The memory feature of ChatGPT is basically like a human taking notes. Of course, the AI can also use other documents as reference. This technique is called RAG. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation

Sidenote. This isn’t the place to ask technical questions about AI. It’s like asking your friendly neighborhood evangelical about evolution.

I have the distinct impression that a number of people would object to the purpose of re-hosting their content as part of a commercial service, especially one run by Google.

Anyway, now no one has to worry about Google helping people bypass their robots.txt or IP-blocks or whatever counter-measures they take. And Google doesn’t have to worry about being sued. Next stop: The Wayback Machine.

Are you really conflating people who make their living based upon their acting skills and likeness with landlords?

No. I am talking about rent-seeking.

Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions, and potential national decline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

You could argue to what a degree landlords or Elon Musk are engaged in rent-seeking. Likeness rights are a clear example, though.

Imagine in the near future. Some famous person licenses their likeness for a show, game, movie. Maybe the producer hires an unknown actor that is then digitally altered into the famous person, like a more advanced version of Gollum. Or maybe the VFX artists can do it on their own. These guys work. The famous person does nothing. They might be dead, while the rights-owners still collect license fees.

Knowing people who are not famous but are SAG-AFTRA actors, I’m going to have to disagree very much on that.

How do likeness rights benefit non-famous people?

Turning likeness into an intellectual property implies the right to sell it. Apparently you want to argue for likeness, so I don’t see why you would use such clauses as an argument.

That’s a poor and fallacious argument there.

It’s not an argument, as you have recognized. I hoped it would make you think.

You know that not everyone in Hollywood is part of SAG-AFTRA, right? Have you ever wondered what happened to them during the strike? I guess they just have to fend for themselves. If the “union” doesn’t care about those guys, do you think the leadership cares about the small members?

Actors are a conservative lot. At the bottom, you have the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” and at the top… Well, you know. It’s not common on lemmy to cheer for such a system.

Shocked? You’d think all the people outraged at having their websites scraped would be delighted. That’s probably the real reason for this.

That probably indicates a problem with the estimates.

From the source:

Our primary approach calculates training costs based on hardware depreciation and energy consumption over the duration of model training. Hardware costs include AI accelerator chips (GPUs or TPUs), servers, and interconnection hardware. We use either disclosures from the developer or credible third-party reporting to identify or estimate the hardware type and quantity and training run duration for a given model. We also estimate the energy consumption of the hardware during the final training run of each model.

As an alternative approach, we also calculate the cost to train these models in the cloud using rented hardware. This method is very simple to calculate because cloud providers charge a flat rate per chip-hour, and energy and interconnection costs are factored into the prices. However, it overestimates the cost of many frontier models, which are often trained on hardware owned by the developer rather than on rented cloud hardware.

https://epochai.org/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-train-frontier-ai-models

You do realize that the vast majority of voice actors are not famous right?

Yes, that’s the point. You are not defending voice actors by demanding likeness rights.

I am not sure why this is so difficult to understand. Maybe there is some confusion about the technology. You only need a few seconds of audio to clone a voice. You don’t need hours of audio from a professional. That’s why the tech can be used for scams. Likeness rights won’t create jobs for voice actors. Only free money for famous people. You can also generate random voices.

Leading AI voice companies like Elevenlabs require you to have permission to clone a voice. But how can they check if their customers are being truthful? In practice, it simply means that famous people, whose voices are known, may not be imitated. Likeness rights, by their nature, can only be enforced, with any kind of effectiveness, for the rich and famous.

OpenAI tried to hire Johansson. When she declined, they hired a different, less famous actress. Maybe they did that to defend against lawsuits, or maybe it gives better results. If they had engineered a nonexistent voice, it would be almost impossible to make the case that they did not imitate Johansson. But still, everyone is talking about that poor famous, rich person who got ripped off. What about the actress who actually provided the voice? I guess she can look for another job, because Johansson owns that voice type.

one of the few influential unions in the US

You mean Ronald Reagan’s old outfit? Do you even know who Ronald Reagan was?

Something as short as “Skywalker” can’t be copyrighted. You don’t need permission to use a trademark as long as you don’t harm the brand or confuse the customer. Since trademarks are often family names, there are a number of unrelated companies that operate under the same name but in a different business.

And it’s a landlord’s job to collect rent. It’s Elon Musk’s job to maximize shareholder value.

It’s ok if you watch out for numero uno. I’m not expecting more. But you are wrong to think that this doesn’t affect you. You can’t opt out of society. You won’t be able to avoid products with licensed voices. Your taxes will be paying for enforcement against “pirates”. And most importantly, every new privilege for the rich and famous changes society. With every step, the elite becomes more entrenched and the bottom more hopeless. It’s a matter of enlightened self-interest. If we only reject what directly hurts us individually, then the elites will simply build themselves a new feudalism.

Do you want the rich to be richer? Because that’s how you make the rich richer. People like Scarlett Johanson will be able to license their likeness for millions or billions. Of course, we would have the same rights; the same rights to own a mansion and a yacht. Feeling lucky?

That’s the kind of capitalism that Marx rages against: Laws that let people demand money without contributing labor.

This isn’t sci-fi AI. It’s not going to use itself. It’s a new tool for digital artists, including VFX artists. I expect it will benefit them by making them more useful.