This article stinks of an agenda. The author goes out of their way not to mention the term Fediverse (pluriverse? wtf is that?), and they clearly haven’t done their due diligence on Activity Pub. Either they skimped on the research or this article was heavily edited afterwards to remove any concept of the Fediverse being a viable alternative to centralized platforms. Doesn’t surprise me coming from Business Insider.

That being said, the overall dynamic the article speaks to is valid, as is the discussion it engenders, so have an upvote despite my gripes with the writing.

Well, borked picture posting on kbin wouldn’t load the picture properly and now it won’t let me delete the thread, so here it is until I can manage to get this post to delete.

It looks like the key in the ruling here was that the AI created the work without the participation of a human artist. Thaler tried to let his AI, “The Creativity Machine” register the copyright, and then claim that he owned it under the work for hire clause.

The case was ridiculous, to be honest. It was clearly designed as an attempt to give corporations building these AI’s the copyrights to the work they generate from stealing the work of thousands of human artists. What’s clever here is that they were also trying to sideline the human operators of AI prompts. If the AI, and not the human prompting it, owns the copyright, then the company that owns that AI owns the copyright - even if the human operator doesn’t work for them.

You can see how open this interpretation would be to abuse by corporate owners of AI, and why Thaler brought the case, which was clearly designed to set a precedent that would allow any media company with an AI to cut out human content creators entirely.

The ruling is excellent, and I’m glad Judge Howell saw the nuances and the long term effects of her decision. I was particularly happy to see this part:

In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.

This protects a wide swath of artists who are doing incredible AI assisted work, without granting media companies a stranglehold on the output of the new technology.

The sun always shines brighter on the day you leave an abusive partner. Welcome to what the internet was like before centralization - a playground of imagination, unfettered thought, and unbridled creativity. Congratulations on becoming part of the renaissance that is the Fediverse and breaking free from the stench of the Spezticle.

Let’s call out the particular global investment vampire in this story, KKR - Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, because it’s the Count Dracula of hedge funds, and also the company that killed Toys ‘R’ Us:

This whole thing smelled like enshittification to me, so I kept digging, this time into OverDrive itself. Right away I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR.

With that sentence, my audience just divided into two types of people

• the ones who (like me, usually) pay no particular attention to the world of “high finance”, don’t recognize the moniker, and so had zero reaction,

and

• the ones like my friend who happens to be a business journalist at the New York Times, whose reaction as soon as I said “KKR” was the aural equivalent of the Munch scream.

The private equity firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, I quickly learned, was either the inventor of, or an early pioneer in, basically all the Shitty Business Practices: leveraged buyouts, corporate raiding, vulture capitalism. They’ve been at it since the 1970s and they’re still going strong.

Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile.

KKR was the subject of the famous 1989 book (and subsequent movie) Barbarians at the Gate, in which a pair of investigative journalists from the Wall Street Journal detail what one Times reviewer called the “avarice, malice, and egomania” of KKR’s leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco with “all the suspense of a first-rate thriller”. The ultimate result: KKR’s private equity barons raked in the cash, while thousands of employees were axed and consumer prices of RJR Nabisco products soared.

More recently, KKR teamed up with two other private equity firms to execute a leveraged buyout of Toys ‘R’ Us. They deliberately weighted down the company with a crushing level of debt in order to begin feeding on its profits; they sucked out half a billion dollars as the company staggered along for another dozen years. When Toys ‘R’ Us finally collapsed and died in 2018, the vultures flapped off, unconcerned, leaving 33,000 desperate workers unemployed and without severance.

Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.

…and now it’s come for your local library.

I have to admit, Barbie becoming a Chinese feminist icon was not on my 2023 bingo card. Anyone taking bets on when we’re gonna get a kpop version of this classic?

For all the Redditors now breathing a sigh of relief, grab a beer, take a load off, and remember, remember, the 5th of November.

To be fair, Aaron wasn’t really heavily involved with Reddit. He was involved with Infogami, which failed and was merged with Reddit. Per this post, he got equity in Reddit as a result, but only worked for a few months on the actual site.

After his death and the media portrayal of him as a martyr for free speech, Reddit started claiming him as “co-founder” much more vocally than they had previously. While technically he had that title, his involvement on Reddit was neither starting the company nor working on it for any extended period of time.

That being said, given what Reddit’s become, wherever his spirit roams now, I’m sure he’s relieved to have his name off the site.

This is like an incel posting on a dating site after calling all women whores.

And of course, it’s a political stunt to please Edrogan:

The Kurdish refugee journalist Vedat Yeler has called the eviction and destruction of the Lavrio camp a “NATO gift to [Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan.” The eviction took place only a few days before the summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on July 11 in Vilnius, Lithuania, where both Greece and Turkey were to be present. The two NATO members have wrangled over the Cyprus conflict and territorial disputes in the Aegean Sea for many decades. In mutual populist slander, Turkish politicians have been accusing Greece of harboring “terrorists” in the Lavrio camp and pressuring the Greek state to close it down for years. However, since the re-election of both Erdoğan’s Sunni-nationalist regime in Turkey and Mitsotakis’ New Democracy government in Greece in May and June, 2023, respectively, there has been a shift in bilateral relations between the two countries. During a visit in Cyprus a few days before the eviction, the Greek Foreign Minister expressed a commitment to improve relations with Turkey. The attack on Kurdish political refugees in Greece can be understood as an attempt to showcase these efforts before the NATO summit.

Greece should be ashamed of itself - evicting innocent families at gunpoint to appease a foreign autocrat. I’m not familiar with EU law, but I’m hoping someone in the comments has an analysis and legal case for the Lavrio residents - given that the camp was established community for over 50 years, there has to be some legal recourse they can use to push back.

A fine namesake, passed down through the generations, a mark of greatness none could have foretold, for his would be the seed that gave birth to a dynasty, and in 40054, Lord Syntax, Emperor of the Error, takes arms as Twelfth Commander of the Line against the Googlish heretics and their daemonic servers.

chainsword revs

GO BABY GO

Y’all would make Harriet Tubman proud. Here’s the direct link to Red State Access for those looking for the community support networks mentioned in the article.

It’s not necessarily unethical, but it’s usually a waste of time. Kinda like Twitter.

Personally I’d prefer not to have someone speaking for me, despite the supposed anonymity of the accounts. If you post any amount of content, it’s likely the account can be linked back to you after the sale, which could prove problematic depending on what the new owner does with it.

But I’m a bit paranoid about such things after experiencing internet stalking. I don’t see anything morally wrong with it, just that consequences from the sale might affect me negatively in the future.

I wasn’t gonna cry until I saw the drawings on the walls - that’s a piece of animation history right there, and something you just can’t recreate in a new space. If you framed some of that sheet rock and saved it for a generation or two, the cash from the collectors auction you’d get for it would probably pay enough to bring back Space Ghost.

My personal ones for corporate use:

• Never use I when you can use we.

• Even if you’re the only one working on a project, never refer to it as yours. Always refer to it as ours.

• Don’t apologize, present solutions.

• Don’t say “read my fucking email again you goddamn illiterate moron”, say “As previously noted in our communications…”

@Bendersmember Content generation has slowed and from what I can tell, comment participation is way down. Right now, after going through and subscribing to a number of magazines, my kbin feed is more useful and active than reddit ever was, although the audience is clearly smaller (but seriously growing since last week). The quality of the content is better, and it’s much easier to filter out the shitposting.

The clearest place to see content drought this is in /r/all - the top posts are all 3 - 15 hours old. Before the blackout, it would refresh in a matter of minutes, not hours.

I think that while Reddit’s user count has been rebounding since the blackout, their level of content submitted has cratered as a result of the admin actions. All of my feeds that didn’t participate in the blackout have slowed and/or stalled there. I believe Huffman made everyone rethink about posting there, and as the content dries out, so will the userbase.

Once the third party tools die next month and the ability to sift through the content drought is reduced to the standard Reddit interface, we’re going to see a black hole effect that will accelerate the slow heat death of r/all. The content submitters are clearly moving to other platforms, and the explosion of content and users on kbin and lemmy is a testament to this dynamic.

It’s clear that admins are re-submitting popular content to try and blunt the fallout, but it speaks to greater failing - Reddit no longer has the trust of its users, and the sense of a coherent, save community space to contribute to has been broken beyond repair.

You can’t replace that with AI, but it’s pretty funny to watch them try.