I doubt it. Don’t get me wrong, I am not defending those fascists, but a 14 year old (freshman?) is not going to just up and kill a bunch of people over politics they almost definitely do not care about one bit.
Bullying has always been part of human nature. Mass shootings are a modern phenomenon. They also didn’t become widespread until well after it was possible to obtain the weapons necessary to carry one out. Bullies are a factor but it’s a far more complex subject than that issue alone can explain.
I was bullied as a kid, and if it had been that easy for me to get guns back then I would have seriously looked into it.
Yeah, it is that simple.
The relatively recent accessibility of guns everywhere in some parts of the country makes gun tragedies a lot more likely.
Whether it’s bullying at school, domestic partner violence, or cops having to shoot first because a perp on the street is much more likely to have a gun than other countries.
Kids shooting people in school has been around just as long. Usually they shot teachers. Note that parents were concerned about the safety of kids bringing pistols to school even back during the pioneer days:
This is the obviously correct decision, and no other decision was realistically possible. The only difference between what the Internet Archive was doing and what any other piracy webpage does is that the Internet Archive was claiming to do it for a good cause. What were they thinking?
If I am not mistaken, the difference was that the Internet Archive was distributing books with a DRM that would make the PDF unusable after a certain time. You could relate it to how a physical library offers books for a limited time, for free. Now, of course, one could bypass the DRM or copy the contents differently, but so can another person photocopy a book they borrowed physically. Meanwhile, other physical libraries are allowed to distribute e-books, but I’m not sure if that’s made possible due to licensing fees.
I’m not saying that they approached this well, especially given the copyright laws in the US, but it was indeed a good thing for the normal person at the time. Too bad that the judicial system in the US is biased towards leeching companies. I really can’t wait to see the AI vs publishers fight, though. Let’s see who has deeper pockets and better plants in the courts :D
The NEL was an offshoot of an ongoing digital lending project called the Open Library, in which the Internet Archive scans physical copies of library books and lets people check out the digital copies as though they’re regular reading material instead of ebooks. The Open Library lent the books to one person at a time—but the NEL removed this ratio rule, instead letting large numbers of people borrow each scanned book at once.
It sounds like what you’re describing is what they were doing before they did the thing for which they got sued.
As for AI, I think that in general using a copyrighted work to train an AI is a transformative use and therefore that it is permitted by law. Specific instances in which an AI outputs copyrighted text without any transformative modifications may still be copyright infringement They may also be fair use, in the way that copying a short excerpt from a longer document is fair use. I’m not a lawyer.
Anyway, if the courts rule against the AI companies, the enforcement of such a ruling would be disastrous for the ability for American companies to compete with international rivals who will still freely use the training data that American companies would no longer have access to. A law would be (or at least should be) passed to prevent that, although the tech companies might end up paying some nominal fee.
One problem, if it even is a problem, is that NaNoWriMo uses a honour system for the word counts. They had word count verification in past but it accepted “obfuscated” manuscripts (each letter replaced with random letters, or something similar). They don’t have any way of assessing the quality of the writing, and that absolutely goes against the spirit of the event anyway.
(For a lot of writers this could be the first time they try writing a novel. Last thing they want is an algorithm rejecting their work if it sounds too much like AI. That’d be fucking horrible.)
Ultimately, NaNoWriMo isn’t about quality of writing, it’s about getting into the habit producing text for 30 days. Using any AI to create novel text goes straight up against that idea.
I’ve always said it’s OK that you’re not producing your 100% best prose in some NaNoWriMo days. Or just come up with tangentially related ramblings. It’s, uh, a postmodern composition technique. But try to use a brain, OK? AI will just produce irrelevant nonsense. One of my fave technique is that if I’m really desperate in NaNoWriMo, I fire up lipsum.com and generate a day’s worth of lorem lipsum nonsense. I can do it once. Then I must remove words from that block if I exceed the daily quota.
notice if I post on political toots I get a few zero follower accounts following me. never follow back but odd. not really paranoid so not really after me? meh
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