The Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)

The SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) has announced that they are participating in a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic AI, which used an absolute metric shitton of authors' books to train its AI. While it's been ruled in one case that these actions don't, technically, constitute copying the book (because the training doesn't leave actual copies of the trained books, only of the  responses to having been trained on it, in short), it HAS been ruled that just grabbing copyrighted material and using it for a commercial purpose (such as training your commercial AI) is not a fair use. 

Anthropic AI is currently valued at around 150-160 billion dollars, just as a note. This is not a small company. 

From my point of view, it's absolutely open and shut: did they make use of copyrighted works to make a commercial product? Yes. Did they know they were doing so? Yes. Did they know they SHOULD pay for the rights to make use of those works? Yes. They simply concluded that it would be expensive, so they grabbed archives of pirated copies. 

The penalties for this should be substantial. This isn't like someone just downloading a book to read, in which case the most you could argue is that they owe you the purchase price for the copy they made. This is taking people's copyrighted work to use to make a commercial product that you intend to profit from. Conceptually this is no different than making a movie or other derivative work from the copyrighted material. The movie may differ drastically from the book -- it may in the worst case have little but names to show the connection. Even so, the moviemaker HAS to have paid the author for the rights to make the movie using their book. 

Note that there is no argument in this case that Anthropic did not, in fact, make use of these works. It's admitted that they did. 

But if "not retaining a copy, just the impressions" is good enough, then why can't I go and publish a Lord of the Rings fanfic? If I put the book away and don't look at it while writing, I'm just using my own impressions from the book to write the fanfic. Better yet, there's a lot of books I've only read once; if Anthropic's allowed this argument, then I should be able to freely use anything I remember from any book I've ever read. 

To an extent, of course, we DO do that -- we're influenced by everything we read, inspired or angered by it. But we also are expected to make a conscious effort to not merely TAKE the intellectual property. Since current AIs are incapable of "conscious effort", and by their nature literally do not RECALL the sources of their training (part of Anthropic and others' defense against accusations of 'copying'), the responsibility for such conscious effort devolves upon Anthropic and their personnel. 

Thus, it would be my contention that Anthropic currently owes every author whose work was used for this training, first a licensing fee -- negotiated appropriately for current and anticipated valuation of their business -- and second, a penalty fee for having DELIBERATELY chosen to try to avoid doing the legally obvious and required licensing. 

I would think that a minimum for that would be a thousand dollars per book infringed for licensing, and five hundred for being deliberately sneaky about it. That's a lowball figure -- note that even an OPTION to use someone's book for a movie -- not even an actual rights assignment -- is usually in the thousand-plus range. In this case it's not just an option -- they DID use the intellectual property. 

The other reason it has to be a significant number is that everyone is aware that the various IP industries are very much interested in eventually using AI to supplement or even replace human creators. If that's the goal, well, those of us who'll be being used to TEACH our replacements deserve a hell of a salary, so to speak. 

I hope this suit goes forward well. 



 

People often will answer the above question with a list of things the government should *do* (operate courts, etc.), but these usually circle around the actual answer to that question. And obviously people will give many answers to it. 

My answer, after my years of thinking about it in different ways, is fairly simple:

The function of government is to provide the services, capabilities and resources to perform tasks that, for one reason or another, individuals and private enterprise are incapable, or ill-suited, to reliably provide.  

By its nature, the precise tasks the government should perform will vary depending on the size and nature of the governed region and population (and, indeed, by the available technology -- if you go back in time you'll find there's some very different constraints on both private and governmental ability to act than there are today). 

Today, here in the USA, we're dealing with a truly MASSIVE country in multiple ways. Our population is heading up towards four hundred million people -- as many people as there were in the entire world only about 800 years ago. The continental USA is close to three thousand miles across and a couple thousand or so North-South, and covers terrain and biomes of nearly every description. Economically, despite Trump and company's current attempts to blow it up, it's still one of the most powerful economies on the face of the Earth.

Moreover, socially it is, and has always been, a clumsily-assembled patchwork, made of everything from religious refugees to slaves and their descendants, the Native American survivors of dozens if not hundreds of different tribes and tribal networks, former slaveowners and abolitionists, Irish famine refugees and Europeans fleeing WWII, and many others. The elite designers of our Constitution, flawed as they were, at least were smart enough to steal ideas from the best (the Iroquois) and add their own, trying to create a structure that would serve to create a country somewhat better than the ones they left behind. They... sort of succeeded -- which is, to their credit, about all that ANY small group of people could be expected to do, especially when they can't benefit from our 200+ years of hindsight. 

This socioeconomic "patchwork", however, is a large part of the reason we see our current problems. To a great extent, the conflicts we see are not just racism, sexism, etc., but basic philosophies in conflict -- ones so basic that they are rarely actually taken out and EXAMINED by the people who adhere to them. 

The answers to a few relatively simple questions can reveal these divides. 

1) Are human beings of inherent worth?
2) What are the limits of an individual's rights? When can another individual, or a society, restrict them?
3) Do individuals owe anything to the society in which they live? Why or why not?

From my point of view, these are the answers:

1) Yes. We are the one species we know of that is not only sapient and self-aware, but inherently able to imagine the worlds that could be, but are not -- meaning we can create or destroy in ways that no other creature we know of. I believe that, to quote one of our classic founding lines, all human beings are endowed with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

2) Put simply, one individual's rights are limited whenever and however they come into conflict with other individuals' rights. A society, being a collective of individuals working towards a presumed common good (or at least stability) or another individual may restrict individuals' rights when the actions under those rights would harm others. (more complicated questions arise about judging harm on one side or another, but that's detail work, not basic principles)

3) Yes, absolutely. Even if you have a terrible, sucky childhood here, you're still in a setting that has resources and capabilities that you simply could not ever get for yourself. A single library is the accumulation of knowledge of centuries. If you continue to live in the society, you owe something to it, even if you owe nothing, or less than nothing, to specific individuals within it. 

There are some other similar questions and answers, but these suffice as a start. The problem, as I mentioned earlier, is that a lot of people don't really think about these things -- which means that not only may they not know their answers, but they may act in ways contradictory to their beliefs in one or more areas because it suits their particular preferences or needs in another context. 

So let's look back at those three rights, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

To me, it's intuitively obvious that you have no right to life if preserving your life is not in your personal control. This includes anything that's essential to life -- food, clothing, shelter, medical care. People who want these restricted or "means-tested" are, implicitly, saying that not EVERYONE is of inherent worth -- that some people don't deserve to live. To me, it's also obvious that the basic level should be one on which the recipients are comfortable; not some fabulous lifestyle, but not eating beans and rice every meal for months, not wearing terrible shoes and worn out clothing, not living in a house without sanitation or refrigeration or heating and cooling. At a level, in short, where they can quietly enjoy the life they have. 

You have no liberty if you are restricted from doing anything you might like that won't harm anyone. In a large society, of course, "harm" can come in a lot of forms, concentrated, diffuse, physical, social, economic, and the society and other individuals have the right to draw the lines there. But things like "I want to marry a person o fthe same sex" or "I want to watch this movie that someone else doesn't like" or "I want to wear this traditional clothing of my people without being bothered" don't harm anyone, and shouldn't even be a matter of question. The questions come in when you say, instead, "I don't want YOU to do these things because I don't like them". 

The Pursuit of Happiness is the most nebulous of them, but to me it's again fairly clear: a person can't really "pursue happiness" if they lack the time, resources, and freedom to do so. They should not be driven to work so hard that they cannot relax and enjoy life; they should have time to themselves and their friends and family. They should have enough spare resources to allow them at least some basic choices of luxury and entertainment. Otherwise, they can't "pursue" happiness, let alone attain it. 

A lot of people who may oppose these viewpoints are often doing so because in their gut they believe -- they WANT to believe -- that success comes from effort, that happiness is achievable by those who reach for it, and that the world is FAIR. And therefore, if someone's getting all that stuff without what they see as an appropriate amount and type of effort, it's Not Fair -- it's cheating at the most basic level. Maybe even it's theft, stealing the benefits that someone else could have gotten if they worked for it. 

This strangely idealistic concept is, unfortunately, one of the causes of some of the worst actions of our society, because such people will work extraordinarily hard to prevent any such things from happening -- often even if it costs them a great deal. For instance, drug testing for people on various government programs has essentially UNIVERSALLY shown itself to be hideously expensive -- it costs much more to do all the testing than it would to give the very few people actually on drugs the benefits anyway -- and it creates barriers for even those who "deserve" the support. 

If you accept that all human beings deserve their basic rights, these problems disappear; there's no need to waste money testing because everyone has the same rights. 

"But the cost!" is often one of the major arguments; the problem with that argument is that often it's the BARRIERS that cost. The American "healthcare system" is a prime example. The insurance company setup effectively DOUBLES the cost of our healthcare; providing Medicare for All without any gatekeeping would improve our country's health while cutting the actual cost of healthcare in half. 

And it's more than that; ensuring everyone IS taken care of on a basic level ultimately benefits everyone -- by reducing the cost of emergency care, of patchwork solutions to ongoing problems, of stopgaps that simply don't solve the problem. 

There's more to say on all this, but it's late and I've got to stop for now. 

And this is the last chapter to post, because Fenrir will be out tomorrow! 

( Time was growing very short... )






Go, indeed!

 Didn't get to post this yesterday. 

Some people are  more surprised than others by this turn of events...

( ... one of them for different reasons... )




But why wait?

The project was moving along...
( ... and that meant things that had to be done publicly... )
 


Well, THAT doesn't sound good at all.

The other side in this project had plans too...

( ...and some of those were dangerous to everyone... ) 





Why can't we all just get along?

 Not cutting this one. 



Stephen Miller, one of the likely main puppetmasters behind the increasingly incoherent President Trump, said that the Administration is "actively looking at" suspending habeas corpus. 

Right or Left Wing, this should be yanking you out of your chair shouting "WHAT THE EVERLIVING F**K?".

Habeas corpus, or, roughly, "produce the body", is an absolutely FUNDAMENTAL principle of Western legal jurisprudence. It is written directly into the Constitution, but predates it -- all the way back to the Magna Carta ("Great Writ") which defined the limits of the powers of the King and his government with respect to the citizens. It is the most basic requirement of modern law that you CANNOT simply arrest a person without a proper warrant -- that the government is REQUIRED to present, to a properly empowered judge, the evidence that you, personally, are properly and justifiably suspected of a particular and defined wrongdoing, and that therefore you may be detained and held for trial. 

This is a UNIVERSAL right -- it applies to all persons, not just citizens, not even just those legally present, and it MUST do so. 

Why?

Because habeas corpus -- following that required process of presenting evidence and satisfying the legal system that not only has some legal wrongdoing occurred, but that there is good and sufficient reason to believe that THIS PARTICULAR PERSON is responsible for it -- is THE ONLY PROTECTION ANY OF US HAVE AGAINST BEING ARRESTED AND DISAPPEARED. 

"But wait, shouldn't it only apply to citizens, or at least legally present persons?"

Um, guy, HOW DO YOU KNOW SOMEONE IS ILLEGALLY PRESENT... unless you present legal evidence to that fact? 

It is not sufficient that a police officer (or other member of law enforcement) THINKS they have the right person. They have to be SURE. They have to PROVE it. They have to provide good and sufficient reason to believe that this person is the one they sought, and that they have sufficient evidence to justify that person's arrest and detainment -- and THAT PERSON MUST HAVE A CHANCE TO DEFEND THEMSELVES -- to argue "No, man, that's the guy in Apartment 2B, not 2A, which is mine. I'm not the guy you want", and have proper legal representation for it. 

This is not optional. This is a bedrock and absolutely NECESSARY principle of US law, and the very THOUGHT that ANYONE in the Federal government -- let alone someone highly enough placed to actually be able to try and "SUSPEND" it -- should send shivers down your spine. 

And it is, unfortunately, DIRECTLY in line with what these people have been doing all along. They have shown an utter contempt for the law as it stands, while claiming to be for "law and order". The structure of Project 2025 is a framework for creating a very UN-American government, one run primarily by the President and his loyalty-checked, handpicked sycophants, for the service of both corporate stockholders and a peculiarly virulent strain of Evangelical "Christianity". 

To those who have looked at history, there are an awful, AWFUL lot of parallels here between the Trumpian new regime and that seen in Germany in 1933.

Business as usual isn't as usual as business is...

 ( ... but when you're President, it's still business... )


She calls the shots in the end. 

There's lots of prep to do before you go to space...

( ... including finding out if you CAN go to space... )
 


Well, at least one hurdle cleared...

 
... I've managed to avoid asking for quite a few months, but I have to ask that people give whatever assistance they can to my GoFundMe. The most recent update outlines some of the issues I'm encountering. 

For those who might want to contribute something smaller once a month or so, there is my Patreon, where you also get some kind of reward at the various levels. 

Thanks in advance for any aid you could give. And if you can't, yes, I absolutely understand. A lot of us are in the same position.