It’s so ridiculous when corporations steal everyone’s work for their own profit, no one bats an eye but when a group of individuals do the same to make education and knowledge free for everyone it’s somehow illegal, unethical, immoral and what not.
Using publically available data to train isn’t stealing.
Daily reminder that the ones pushing this narrative are literally corporation like OpenAI. If you can’t use copyright materials freely to train on, it brings up the cost in such a way that only a handful of companies can afford the data.
They want to kill the open-source scene and are manipulating you to do so. Don’t build their moat for them.
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Was this a meta joke and you had a chatbot write your comment?
if someone said this to me I’d cry
The point that was being made was that public available data includes a whole lot amount of copyrighted data to begin with and its pretty much impossible to filter it out. Grand example, the Eiffel tower in Paris is not copyright protected, but the lights on it are so you can only using pictures of the Eiffel tower during the day, if the picture itself isn’t copyright protected by the original photographer. Copyright law has all these complex caveat and exception that make it impossible to tell in glance whether or not it is protected.
This in turn means, if AI cannot legally train on copyrighted materials it finds online without paying huge sums of money then effectively only mega corporation who can pay copyright fines as cost of business will be able to afford training decent AI.
The only other option to produce any ai of such type is a very narrow curated set of known materials with a public use license but that is not going to get you anything competent on its own.
EDIT: In case it isn’t clear i am clarifying what i understood from [email protected] comment, not adding to it.
So then we as a society aren’t ready to untangle the mess of our infancy in the digital age. ChatGPT isn’t something we must have at all costs, it’s something we should have when we can deploy it while still respecting the rights of people who have made the content being used to train it.
I would go even further and say that we should have it until we can be sure it will respect others’ rights. All kind of rights, not only Copyright. Unlike Bing at the beginning, with all it’s bullying and menaces, or Chatgpt regurgitating private information gathered from God knows where.
The problem with waiting is the arms race with other governments. I feel it’s similar to fossil fuels, but all governments need to take the risk of being disadvantaged. Damned prisoner’s dilemma.
I didn’t want any of this shit. IDGAF if we don’t have AI. I’m still not sure the internet actually improved anything, let alone what the benefits of AI are supposed to be.
Machine learning techniques are often thought of as fancy function approximation tools (i.e. for regression and classification problems). They are tools that receive a set of values and spit out some discrete or possibly continuous prediction value.
One use case is that there are a lot of really hard+important problems within CS that we can’t solve efficiently exactly (lookup TSP, SOP, SAT and so on) but that we can solve using heuristics or approximations in reasonable time. Often the accuracy of the heuristic even determines the efficiency of our solution.
Additionally, sometimes we want predictions for other reasons. For example, software that relies on user preference, that predicts home values, that predicts the safety of an engineering plan, that predicts the likelihood that a person has cancer, that predicts the likelihood that an object in a video frame is a human etc.
These tools have legitamite and important use cases it’s just that a lot of the hype now is centered around the dumbest possible uses and a bunch of idiots trying to make money regardless of any associated ethical concerns or consequences.
It doesn’t matter what you want. What matters is if corporations can extract $ from you, gain an efficiency, or cut their workforce using it.
That’s what the drive for AI is all about.
No doubt.
A perfectly valid stance to take.
You don’t have to use it. You can even disconnect from the internet completely.
Whats the benefit of stopping me from using it?
It’s not like all this data was randomly dumped at the AIs. For data sets to serve as good training materials they need contextual information so that the AI can discern patterns and replicate them when prompted.
We see this when you can literally prompt AIs with whose style you want it to emulate. Meaning that the data it was fed had such information.
Midjourney is facing extra backlash from artists after a spreadsheet was leaked containing a list of artist styles their AI was trained on. Meaning they can keep track of it and they trained the AI with those artists’ works deliberately. They simply pretend this is impossible to figure out so that they might not be liable to seek permission and compensate the artists whose works were used.
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I clarified the comment above which was misunderstood, whether it makes a moral/sane argument is subjective and i am not covering that.
I am not sure why you think there is a claim that openAI is trying to make companies pay, on the contrary the comment i was clarifying (so not my opinion/words) states that openAI is making an argument that anyone should be able to use copyrighted materials for free to train AI.
The costs of running an online service like chatgpt is wildly besides the argument presented. You can run your own open source large language models at home about as well as you can run Bethesda’s Starfield on a same spec’d PC
Those Open source large language models are trained on the same collections of data including copyrighted data.
The logic being used here is:
If It becomes globally forbidden to train AI with copyrighted materials or there is a large price or fine in order to use them for training then the Non-Corporate, Free, Open Source Side of AI will perish or have to go underground while to the For-Profit mega corporations will continue exploit and train ai as usual because they can pay to settle in court.
The Ethical dilemma as i understand it is:
Allowing Ai to train for free is a direct threat towards creatives and a win for BigProfit Enthertainment, not allowing it to train to free is treat to public democratic AI and a win for BigTech merging with BigCrime
Allowing Ai to train for free is a direct threat towards creatives
No. Many creatives fear that AI allows anyone to do what they do, lowering the skill premium they can charge. That doesn’t depend on free training.
Some seem to feel that paying for training will delay AI deployment for some years, allowing the good times to continue (until they retire or die?)
But afterward, you have to ask who’s paying for the extra cost when AI is a normal tool for creatives? Where does the money come from to pay the rent to property owners? Obviously the general public will pay a part through higher prices. But I think creatives may bear the brunt, because it’s the tools of their trade that are more expensive and I don’t think all of that cost can be passed on.
I don’t think lowering the skill level is something we will need to worry about as over time this actually trickles up, A Creative professional trained with AI tools will almost always top a Amateur using the same tools.
The real issue is Style. If you are an Artist with a very recognizable specific style, and you make your money trough commissions you are basically screwed. Many Artists feature a personal style and while borrowing peoples style is common (disney-esque) it’s usually not a problem because within a unique and diverse human mind it rarely results in unintentional latent copying.
That is very well put, I really wish I could have started with that.
Though I envision it as a loss for BigProfit Enthertainment since I see this as a real boon for the indie gaming, animation and eventually filmmaking industry.
It’s definitely overall quite a messy situation.
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I think you’re confusing training it with running it. After it’s trained, you can run it on much weaker hardware.
I am talking about generative AI, be it text or image both have a challenge with copyrighted material.
“executable of a chatbot” lol, aint you cute
“example of video games”
Are you refering to my joke?
I am far from overestimating capacity, Starfield runs mediocre on a modern gaming system compared to other games. The Vicuna 13b llm runs mediocre on the same system compared with gpt 3.5. To this date there is no local model that i would trust for professional use and chatgpt 3.5 doesnt hit that level either.
But it remains a very interesting, rapidly evolving technology that i hope receives as much future open source support as possible.
“I think you literally don’t know what people are talking about” I hate to break it to you but you’re embarrassing yourself.
I presume you must believe the the following lemmy community and resources to be typed up by a group of children, either that or your just naive.
https://github.com/huggingface/transformers
https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceH4/open_llm_leaderboard
https://huggingface.co/microsoft/phi-2 & https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-2-the-surprising-power-of-small-language-models/
Hey man, that’s damn hurtful
I’m not sure if someone else has brought this up, but I could see OpenAI and other early adopters pushing for tighter controls of training data as a means to be the only players in town. You can’t build your own competing AI because you won’t have the same amount of data as us and we’ll corner the market.
If the data has to be paid for, openAI will gladly do it with a smile on their face. It guarantees them a monopoly and ownership of the economy.
Paying more but having no competition except google is a good deal for them.
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The publisher’s will absolutely sell imo. They just publish, the book will be worth the same with or without the help of AI to write it.
I guess there is a possibility that people start replacing bought books with personalized book llm outputs but that strikes me as unlikely.
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It’s current and it’s the only open source project that’s under direct threat? I am both a fan of open source and of generative AI, not sure what that changes in the validity of my arguments.
This isn’t a gotcha but pure rhetoric, which is on par with you. Attack my arguments, or just ignore me the moment it becomes clear you can’t insult yourself out of a debate like you did last time.
I’m not even sure what exactly you are implying but I am not impressed.
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That is literally rhetoric. I could say the same about you and never mentioning artists except when it’s related to AI. But I don’t, I pick your weak arguments apart like an adult instead.
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OpenAI is definitely not the one arguing that they have stole data to train their AIs, and Disney will be fine whether AI requires owning the rights to training materials or not. Small artists, the ones protesting the most against it, will not. They are already seeing jobs and commission opportunities declining due to it.
Being publicly available in some form is not a permission to use and reproduce those works however you feel like. Only the real owner have the right to decide. We on the internet have always been a bit blasé about it, sometimes deservedly, but as we get to a point we are driving away the very same artists that we enjoy and get inspired by, maybe we should be a bit more understanding about their position.
Thats basically my main point, Disney doesn’t need the data, Getty either. AI isn’t going away and the jobs will be lost no matter what.
Putting a price tag in the high millions for any kind of generative model only benefits the big players.
I feel for the artists. It was already a very competitive domain that didn’t really pay well and it’s now much worse but if they aren’t a household name, they aren’t getting a dime out of any new laws.
I’m not ready to give the economy to Microsoft, Google, Getty and Adobe so GRRM can get a fat payday.
If AI companies lose, small artists may have the recourse of seeking compensation for the use and imitation of their art too. Just feeling for them is not enough if they are going to be left to the wolves.
There isn’t a scenario here in which big media companies lose so talking of it like it’s taking a stand against them doesn’t make much sense. What are we fighting for here? That we get to generate pictures of Goofy? The small AI user’s win here seems like such a silly novelty that I can’t see how it justifies just taking for granted that artists will have it much rougher than they already have.
The reality here is that even if AI gets the free pass, large media and tech companies are still primed to profit from them far more than any small user. They will be the one making AI-assisted movies and integrating chat AI into their systems. They don’t lose in either situation.
There are ways to train AI without relying on unauthorized copyrighted data. Even if OpenAI loses, it wouldn’t be the death of the technology. It may be more efficient and effective to train them with that data, but why is “efficiency” enough to justify this overreach?
And is it even wise to be so callous about it? Because it’s not going to stop with artists. This technology has the potential to replace large swaths of service industries. If we don’t think of the human costs now, it will be even harder to make a case for everyone else.
I fully believe AI will be able to replace 50% or more of desk jobs in the near future. It’s definitely a complicated situation and you make good points.
First and foremost, I think it’s imperative the barrier for entry for model training is as low as possible. Anything else basically gives a select few companies the ability to charge a huge subscription fee on all our goods and services.
The data needed is pretty heavy as well, it’s not very pheasible to go off of donated or public domain data.
I also think any job loss is virtually guaranteed and trying to save them is misguided as well as not really benefiting most of those affected.
And yea, the big companies win either way but if it’s easier to use this new tech, we might not lose as hard. Disney for instance doesn’t have any competition but if a bunch of indie animation companies and groups start popping up, it levels the playing field a bit.
In many discussions I’ve seen, small or independent creators are one of the focuses of loss and protection.
Also there’s the acknowledgement that existing jobs will be reduced, eliminated, or transformed.
How much different is this from the mass elimination of the 50s stereotype secretaries? We used to have rooms full of workers typing memos, then we got computers, copiers, etc.
I know there’s a difference between a creator’s work vs a job/task. I’m more curious if these same conversations came up when the office technological advances put those people out? You could find a ton more examples where advancement or efficiency gains reduced employment.
Should technology advancement be tied to not eliminating jobs or taking away from people’s claim to work?
I know there’s more complexity like greed and profits here.
That depends on what your definition of “publicly available” is. If you’re scraping New York Times articles and pulling art off Tumblr then yeah, it’s exactly stealing in the same way scihub is. Only difference is, scihub isn’t boiling the oceans in an attempt to make rich people even richer.
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We have a mechanism for people to make their work publically visible while reserving certain rights for themselves.
Are you saying that creators cannot (or ought not be able to) reserve the right to ML training for themselves? What if they want to selectively permit that right to FOSS or non-profits?
That’s exactly what they’re saying. The AI proponents believe that copyright shouldn’t be respected and they should be able to ignore any licensing because “it’s hard to find data otherwise”
Essentially yes. There isn’t a happy solution where FOSS gets the best images and remains competitive. The amount of data needed is outside what can be donated. Any open source work will be so low in quality as to be unusable.
It also won’t be up to them. The platforms where the images are posted will be selling and brokering. No individual is getting a call unless they are a household name.
None of the artists are getting paid either way so yeah, I’m thinking of society in general first.
The artists (and the people who want to see them continue to have a livelihood, a distinct voice, and a healthy engaged fanbase) live in that society.
The platforms where the images are posted will be selling and brokering
Isn’t this exactly the problem though?
From books to radio to TV, movies, and the internet, there’s always:
- One group of people who create valuable works
- Another group of people who monopolize distribution of those works
The distributors hijack ownership (or de facto ownership) of the work, through one means or another (either logistical superiority, financing requirements, or IP law fuckery) and exploit their position to make themselves the only channel for creators to reach their audience and vice-versa.
That’s the precise pattern that OpenAI is following, and they’re doing it at a massive scale.
It’s not new. Youtube, Reddit, Facebook, MySpace, all of these companies started with a public pitch about democratizing access to content. But a private pitch emerged, of becoming the main way that people access content. When it became feasible for them to turn against their users and liquidate them, they did.
The difference is that they all had to wait for users to add the content over time. Imagine if Google knew they could’ve just seeded Google Video with every movie, episode, and clip ever aired or uploaded anywhere. Just say, “Mon Dieu! It’s impossible for us to run our service without including copyrighted materials! Woe is us!” and all is forgiven.
But honestly, whichever way the courts decide, the legality of it doesn’t matter to me. It’s clearly a “Whose Line Is It?” situation where the rules are made up and ownership doesn’t matter. So I’m looking at “Does this consolidate power, or distribute it?” And OpenAI is pulling perhaps the biggest power grab that we’ve seen.
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Unrelated: I love that there’s a very distinct echo of something we saw with the previous era of tech grift, crypto. The grifters would always say, after they were confronted, “Well, there’s no way to undo it now! It’s on the blockchain!” There’s always this back-up argument of “it’s inevitable so you might as well let me do it”.
Scientific research papers are generally public too, in that you can always reach out to the researcher and they’ll provide the papers for free, it’s just the “corporate” journals that need their profit off of other peoples work…
They want to kill the open-source scene
Yeah, by using the argument you just gave as an excuse to “launder” copyleft works in the training data into permissively-licensed output.
Including even a single copyleft work in the training data ought to force every output of the system to be copyleft. Or if it doesn’t, then the alternative is that the output shouldn’t be legal to use at all.
100% agree, making all outputs copyleft is a great solution. We get to keep the economic and cultural boom that AI brings while keeping the big companies in check.
The point is the entire concept of AI training off people’s work to make profit for others is wrong without the permission of and compensation for the creator regardless if it’s corporate or open source.
I think I’ve decided to not publish anything that I want to keep ownership of, just in case. There’s an entire planet’s worth of countries, which will all have their own sets of laws. It takes waay too long to polish something, only to just give it away for free haha. Someone else is free to do that work if it is that easy. No skin off my back.
I think it’s similar to many other hand-made crafts/items. Most people will buy their clothes from stores, but there are definitely still people who make beautiful clothing from hand better than machines could.
Don’t even get me started on stuff like knitting. It already costs the creator a crap ton of money just for the materials. It takes a crap ton of time to make those, too. Despite the costs, many people just expect those knitted pieces for practically free. The people who expect that pricing are also free to go with machine-produced crafts/items instead.
It comes down to what people want, and what they’re willing to pay, imo. Some people will find value in something physically being put together by another human, and other people will find value in having more for less. Neither is “wrong” necessarily, so long as no one is literally ripped off. (With over 8 billion people, it’s bound to happen at least once. I feel bad for whoever that is.)
That being said, we’ll never be able to honestly say that the specific skills and techniques that are currenty required are the exact same. It would be like calling a photographer amazing at realism painting because their photo looks like real life. Photographers and painters both have their place, but they are not the exact same.
I think that’s also part of what’s frustrating so many artists. Coding AI is not the same as using the colour wheel, choosing materials, working fine motor control, etc. It’s not learning about shadows, contrast, focal points, etc. I can definitely understand people not wanting those aspects to be brushed off, especially since it usually takes most of a lifetime to achieve. A music generator and a violin may both make great music, but they are not the same, and they require different technical skills.
I’ll never buy AI art if I have any say in the matter. I’ll support handmade stuff first, every time.
There is definitely more value in hand made art. Even the fanciest prints on canvas can’t compare and I don’t think AI art will be evoking the same feelings a john waterhouse exhibit does any time soon.
On the subject of publishing, I’ve chosen to embrace it personally. My view is that even the hidden stuff on our comp ends up in a Chinese or US databases anyways.
I love that the people who push this kind of rhetoric often consider themselves left wing, it’s just so silly.
‘every word you ever utter must be considered private property and no other human may benefit from it without payments!’
I mean yes I know you’re going to say socialism is about workers getting fair pay but come on, this is just pure rent seeking. We’re a global community of people, if this comment helps train an ai that can help other people better live their lives, better access medicine and education or other services then I think that’s a wonderful thing.
And yes of course it should be open source and free to all people, that’s why these pushes to make sure only corporations can afford ai are so infuriating
So true.
This talking point, too, is so infuriatingly silly:
I mean yes I know you’re going to say socialism is about workers getting fair pay
Workers, by definition, don’t own what they produce. Copyrights are intellectual property; business capital. Somehow, capitalists are workers in the minds of these people. This is your mind on trickle-down economics.
All of the AI fear mongering is fuelled by mega corps who fear that AI in some sort will eat into their profits and they can’t make money off of it.
Image generation also had similar outcry because open source models smoked all the commercial ones.
Yeah, just wait until they see the ai design tools that allow anyone to casually describe the spare part or upgrade they want and it’ll be designed and printed at home or local fab shop.
Lot of once fairly safe monopolies are going to start looking very shaky, and then things like natural language cookery toolarms disrupting even more…
We’ve only barely started to see what the tech we have now is able to do, yes a million shitty chat bots / img gen apps are cashing in on the hype but when we start seeing some killer apps emerge it’s when people won’t be able to ignore it any longer
Too bad
If you can’t afford to pay the authors of the data required for your project to work, then that sucks for you, but doesn’t give you the right to take anything you want and violate copyright.
Making a data agnostic model and releasing the source is fine, but a released, trained model owes royalties to its training data.
True, Big Tech loves monopoly power. It’s hard to see how there can be an AI monopoly without expanding intellectual property rights.
It would mean a nice windfall profit for intellectual property owners. I doubt they worry about open source or competition but only think as far as lobbying to be given free money. It’s weird how many people here, who are probably not all rich, support giving extra money to owners, merely for owning things. That’s how it goes when you grow up on Ayn Rand, I guess.
This is the hardest thing to explain to people. Just convert it into a person with unlimited memory.
Open AI is sending said person to view every piece of human work, learns and makes connections, then make art or reports based on what you tell/ask this person.
Sci-Hub is doing the same thing but you can ask it for a specific book and they will write it down word for word for you, an exact copy.
Both morally should be free to do so. But we have laws that say the sci-hub human is illegally selling the work of others. Whereas the open ai human has to be given so many specific instructions to reproduce a human work that it’s practically like handing it a book and it handing the book back to you.
What data is public?
Cue the Max Headroom episode where the blanks (disconnected people) are chased by the censors because the blanks steal cable so their children can watch the educational shows and learn to read, and they are forced to use clandestine printing presses to teach them.
what’s this? an anti-corporate message that sneers at cable TV companies??? CANCEL THAT SHOW!!!
that show was so amazingly prescient: the theme of the first episode was how advertising literally kills its viewers and the news covers things up. No wonder they didn’t get renewed. ;)
Reminds me of this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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It’s not that easy, don’t believe the articles being broadcasted every day. They are heavily cherry picked.
Also, if someone is creating copyright works, it is on that person to be responsible if they release or sell it, not the tool they used. Just because the tool can be good (learns well and responds well when asked to make a clone of something) doesn’t mean it is the only thing it does or must do. It is following instructions, which were to make a thing. The one giving the instructions is the issue, and the intent of that person when they distribute is the issue.
If I draw a perfect clone of Donald Duck in the privacy of my home after looking at hundreds of Donald Duck images online, there is nothing wrong with that. If I go on Etsy and start selling them without a license, they will come after ME. Not because I drew it, but because I am selling it and violating a copyright. They won’t go after the pencil or ink manufacturer. And they won’t go after Adobe if I drew it on a computer with Photoshop.
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You are missing his point. Is Disney going after the one who is selling the copy online, or are they going after Adobe?
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Some of us have to work for a living, I can’t reply to every comment the moment it comes in and it seems rude to break the chaine.
In his analogy, openais product was the tool. You can do the same with both img gen and Photoshop, and neither of these prop up their product by implying it’s easy to copyright infringe. That’s why I said you were missing his point but you do you buddy.
Because humans have more rights than tools. You are free to look at copyrighted text and pictures, memorize them and describe them to others. It doesn’t mean you can use a camera to take and share pictures of it.
Acting like every right that AIs have must be identical to humans’, and if not that means the erosion of human rights, is a fundamentally flawed argument.
Whoosh
I pirated 90% of the texts I used to write my thesis at university, because those books would have cost me hundreds of euros that I didn’t have.
Fuck you, capitalism.
I pirated texts for my thesis even when I had access to them through my university. A lot of journals are just too annoying to use.
unfathomably based
He has me so inspired imma go pirate a bunch of textbooks just because I can. I don’t even need them.
What really breaks the suspension of disbelief in this reality of ours is that fucking advertising is the most privacy invasive activity in the world. Seriously, even George Orwell would call bullshit on that.
The amount of advertisements you have to consume weather you consent or not is wild. Billboards on roads, bus banners, marquees, you have no choice unless you don’t leave you house, and then you’re still subject to ads, just ones you sort of consented to by buying TV or Internet service.
Road billboards are always a trip when I visit the US. Not only do they have everything on them from Jesus to abortion to guns they are also incredibly distracting physically, especially at night.
Sign right on the merge of a major highway: “Car accident? Call our injury lawyer hotline.”
I live in the Phoenix area and holy shit the amount of injury lawyer billboards are insane. It’s like every couple hundred feet along the I-10 is an ad for some accident attorney, more often than not multiple ads for the same guy. I see Rafi’s face literally everywhere I go
Visited friends in Detroit once and one of the lawyers bilboards looked like cult recruiting, it was wild. She had them up everywhhhere too.
Agreed. I hate ads passionately. Ive been able to eliminate every source of ads from inside my house except websites, but I immediately back any site that won’t do simple or reading view.
Every moment of my attention taken by some stupid billboard or hearing tvs at a gas station I had to stop at is a moment I could have been thinking about something better. Or nothing, which sometimes would be nice.
Same. I go out of my way to learn how to get around ads. I often wonder, especially now with autism and sensory issues being more highlighted, when will start realizing ads in this overwhelming capacity are absolutely a health issue. Sensory issue are real, and an ad shouldn’t have to give people seizures before it’s considered unhealthy.
Ha, yeah I wish a more concrete link could be made between the stance society has taken with smoking and apply it to visual/auditory pollution.
People are allowed to smoke as long as it’s not being forced upon other people (based on they both have equal rights). What about a right not to be bombarded with garbage every minute while you’re in public? I can’t see this going my way…
Why do people hopl their TV’s up to the internet? I’ll never get it.
What I find even more mind boggling is that despite all that tracking, advertising still misses the mark by a mile. I regularly see the same ad repeated 10 times in a row while also being completely irrelevant to me. Meanwhile I also frequently miss stuff that would be relevant for me and that should be covered by ads (e.g. movie releases, I might pick up the first trailer, but completely miss when the movie actually hits cinemas).
For the money and effort spend on ads you’d think they could do a lot better than what they are.
Ads know your profile better than yourself. It’s telling you you’re a cheap bastard who won’t actually buy popcorn at the movies, making the theater run at a loss.
/S
Make the AI folks use public domain training data or nothing and maybe we’ll see the “life of the author + 75 years” bullshit get scaled back to something reasonable.
Exactly this. I can’t believe how many comments I’ve read accusing the AI critics of holding back progress with regressive copyright ideas. No, the regressive ideas are already there, codified as law, holding the rest of us back. Holding AI companies accountable for their copyright violations will force them to either push to reform the copyright system completely, or to change their practices for the better (free software, free datasets, non-commercial uses, real non-profit orgs for the advancement of the technology). Either way we have a lot to gain by forcing them to improve the situation. Giving AI companies a free pass on the copyright system will waste what is probably the best opportunity we have ever had to improve the copyright system.
They let the Mouse die finally, maybe there is hope for change.
The Mouse isn’t dead, he is risen anew. Freed from the shackles of his creators, he is now more powerful than he could ever have hoped to be before. The mighty tremble beneath the footsteps of old Steamboat Willie. He is a living sign of a new era, one in which it is possible to strike back against his old captors.
What a great take!
I guess any way you look at it, the Mouse isn’t dead dead.
Tbf that number was originally like 20+ years and then Disney lobbied several times to expand it
19 years. It wasn’t life of the author either. It was 19 years after creation date plus an option to renew for another 19 at the end of that period. It was sensible. That’s why we don’t do it anymore.
Wow, I really really like this take. These corporate bitches want to eat there cake and have it, too.
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That’s still the easiest way. Email them, don’t tweet them.
It still works. The journal websites always include author contact info, just e-mail them.
legally
Not necessarily. They often do not own the copyright, so then it depends on fair use exceptions. The real owners have gone after authors, which may be the reason they don’t make their articles downloadable by default.
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You mean asking the publisher?
When you publish an academic paper, the journal/publisher makes you sign a transfer-of-copyright-thing. For example, that meant I could not publish my own papers as a part of my thesis. I had to ask the journals for permission to do that. Depending on how that transfer-agreement is formulated (and I imagine every publisher have a different one), an author giving away a paper they authored to someone on twitter or wherever may not be allowed. Only if you’d ask the publisher and get an ok.
It depends. Some publishers ask the authors to transfer copyright. Others don’t. Even for the ones that do, the pre-print still belongs to the authors.
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I can easily say that every academic I know and have as friends, which is all but two people, have surely “flagrantly violated copyright law”. I have no doubt. They have even asked me for help doing it. I can also tell you that none of those have ever read one of those copyright transfers. I did, once, but I do not understand law-speak and do not remember what it said. I just know that my university had that as a policy – because of lawyers – what we had to do to redistribute our articles. That is also why I had a “may not” in my comment and could only refer to anecdotes, because, surprise, I do not understand the exact details about this. But you know this, because that was in my comment.
Not generally. There may be fair use exceptions allowing the sharing in some situations (depending on jurisdiction) or the publisher/owner may allow it as part of the licensing contract. But I don’t know in what jurisdiction/under what contract, it would be legal to copy something just because some random person asked.
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Well, opinions on morality… I think the whole artificial paywalling should be abolished as being against the public interest. A large faction here seems to take a very right-wing view on property, including copyrights, and will always side with owner.
How would you turn your moral intuition into a general law?
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Tricky intuition. It would mean that authors could not transfer all rights. In that sense, it would limit what they can do with their output. Depending on how far you want to take this, it might not matter or it might not matter a lot. EG how much would you pay for the rights to an ebook if the author can always go and create a legal torrent?
Do you really think it should matter if the new owner is an individual or a corporation? If you only limit corporations, then the rights will simply be transferred to individuals.
Academics don’t care because they don’t get paid for them anyway. A lot of the time you have to pay to have your paper published. Then companies like Elsevier just sit back and make money.
I follow a few researchers with interesting youtube channels, and they often mention that if you ask them or their colleagues for a publication of theirs, chances are they’ll be glad to send it to you.
A lot of them love sharing their work, and don’t care at all for science journal paywalls.
Other than be happy for that attention and being curious of what extra things you can find in their field, they get quoted and that pushes their reputation a little higher. Locking up works heavily limits that, and the only reason behind that is a promise of a basic quality control when accepting works - and it’s not ideal, there are many shady publications. Other than that it’s cash from simple consumers, subscriptions money from institutes for works these company took a hold of and maybe don’t have physical editions anymore just because, return to fig. 1, they depend on being published and quoted.
Sure, that’s a motivation too, but they were also talking about random people who’d find a reference and were curious about their work, not just other researchers who may quote them. It’s not all about h-index.
When a guy literally makes, among other things, regular paleontology news reports and whole videos of his own university course material during summer breaks, and puts all that to youtube it’s safe to assume he just likes popularizing his subject.
Don’t mind? Hell, we want people to read that shit. We don’t profit at all if it’s paywalled, it hurts us and hurts science in general. This is 100% the wishes of scientific for profit journals.
I’m starting to think the term “piracy” is morally neutral. The act can be either positive or negative depending on the context. Unfortunately, the law does not seem to flow from morality, or even the consent of the supposed victims of this piracy.
The morals of piracy also depend on the economic system you’re under. If you have UBI, the “support artists” argument is far less strong, because we’re all paying taxes to support the UBI system that enables people to become skilled artists without worrying about starving or homelessness - as has already happened to a lesser degree before our welfare systems were kneecapped over the last 4 decades.
But that’s just the art angle, a tonne of the early-stage (i.e. risky and expensive) scientific advancements had significant sums of government funding poured into them, yet corporations keep the rights to the inventions they derive from our government funded research. We’re paying for a lot of this stuff, so maybe we should stop pretending that someone else ‘owns’ these abstract idea implementations and come up with a better system.
When you publish something in an academic journal, the journal owns the work. The journal also sells that work and it’s how it makes its money.
Yes it is, and that’s the problem. I work my butt off to identify mechanisms to reduce musculoskeletal injury risk, and then to maintain my employment, I have to hand the rights to that work to a private organization that profits over it. To make matters worse, I then do the work to ensure the quality of other publications for the journal through the peer review process and am not compensated for it.
the journal owns the work.
Fortunately, open access has made some inroads. It is not universally true anymore. The situation is still pretty bad, though.
I know for the law journal that I used to edit the journal owned the final form of the edited and stylised work and granted the author a license to freely use it in perpetuity with attribution as to the original publication.
So the author was free to share free copies as long as it was in the original form with the journal’s name and logo on the first page, or manuscript forms as long as the original publication info was cited. My journal sold electronic and print fornats and had some licensing deals with legal research companies. But we also hosted free electronic copies for anyone that wanted to download an article
For my journal, the significant costs were paid by a foundation and the university that it was a part of. The sales were just to buy like coffee for the office and stuff help offset costs. I know especially in medicine and physical sciences there’s a lot more money involved in this stuff.
this is because the technocrats are allowed to steal from you, but when you steal from them what they’ve stolen from actual researchers that’s a problem
There are no technocrats. Just oligarchs, that titan newer industries. Same as the old boss. Don’t give them more credit than that. It’s evil capitalism. Lump them with bankers, not UX designers imho
In what context would a UI/UX be considered a texhnocrat? I’m very confused
You’re not confused, you’re getting the point. Musk has more in common with Jamie Diamond than the tech workers with which he’s lumped by industry.
It’s not a tech people/company problem. They’re just like accounts, they don’t own the enterprise.
This is different. AI as a transformative tech is going to usher the US economy into the next boom of prosperity. The AI revolution will change the world and allow people to decide if they want to work for money or not (read UBI). In case you haven’t caught on, am being sarcastic.
All this despite ChatGPT being a total complete joke.
Honestly couldn’t tell if you were being sarcastic or not because Poes law until I saw your note.
If all the wealth created by these sorts of things didn’t funnel up to the 0.01% then yeah. It could usher in economic changes that help bring about greater prosperity in the same way mechanical automation should have.
Unfortunately it’s just going to be another vector for more wealth to be removed from your average American and transferred to a corporation
This was a case where you needed the sarcasm tag. Up to then, it was a totally “reasonable” comment from an AI bro.
BTW, plug “crypto” in to your comment for AI, and it’s a totally normal statement from 2020/21. It’s such a similar VC grift.
So, I feel taking an .epub and putting it in a .zip is pretty transformative.
Also you can make ChatGPT (or Copilot) print out quotes with a bit of effort, now that it has Internet.
Can you elaborate on the specific ways that chatgpt is a joke?
Ask Bing!
Adam explains it. Enjoy.
Ah yes, of course. I remember this video. Not all of the specific points, but I do remember Adam Conover really chewing into large language models. Interestingly, that same Adam Conover must have believed AI isn’t actually that useless seeing as he became a leading member of the 2023 Hollywood writers strike, in which AI was a central focus:
Writers also wanted artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, to be used only as a tool that can help with research or facilitate script ideas and not as a tool to replace them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Writers_Guild_of_America_strike
That said, I’m not going to rewatch a 25 minute video for a discussion on lemmy. Any specific points you want to make against chat gpt?
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
From May 2 to September 27, 2023, the Writers Guild of America (WGA)—representing 11,500 screenwriters—went on strike over a labor dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). With a duration of 148 days, the strike is tied with the 1960 strike as the second longest labor stoppage that the WGA has performed, only behind the 1988 strike (153 days). Alongside the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, which continued until November, it was part of a series of broader Hollywood labor disputes. Both strikes contributed to the biggest interruption to the American film and television industries since the COVID-19 pandemic. The lack of ongoing film and television productions resulted in some studios having to close doors or reduce staff. The strike also jeopardized long-term contracts created during the media streaming boom: big studios could terminate production deals with writers through force majeure clauses after 90 days, saving them millions of dollars. In addition, numerous other areas within the global entertainment ecosystem were impacted by the strike action, including the VFX industry and prop making studios. Following a tentative agreement, union leadership voted to end the strike on September 27, 2023. On October 9, the WGA membership officially ratified the contract with 99% of WGA members voting in favor of it. Its combined impact with the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike resulted in the loss of 45,000 jobs, and "an estimated $6.5 billion" loss to the economy of Southern California.
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In case you haven’t caught on, am being sarcastic.
It sounds like a completely sincere Marc Andressen post to me.
Oh OpenAI is just as illegal as SciHub. More so because they’re making money off of stolen IP. It’s just that the Oligarchs get to pick and choose. So of course they choose the arrangement that gives them more control over knowledge.
They’re not serving you the exact content they scraped, and that makes all the difference.
Well if you believe that you should look at the times lawsuit.
Word for word on hundreds/thousands of pages of stolen content, its damming
Why do you assume that I haven’t? The case hasn’t been resolved and it’s not clear how The NY Times did what they claim, which is may as well be manipulation. It’s a fair rebuttal by OpenAI. The Times haven’t provided the steps they used to achieve that.
So unless that’s cleared up, it’s not damming in the slightest. Not yet, anyway. And that still doesn’t invalidate my statement above, because it’s still under very specific circumstances when that happens.
Also intention is pretty important when determining the guilt of many crimes. OpenAI doesnt intentionally spit back an author’s exact words, their intention is to summarize and create unique content.
Ah, yes. The defense of “I didn’t mean to do it.” Always a classic.
No, the real defense is “that’s not how LLMs work” but you are all hinging on the wrong idea. If you so think that an LLM is capable of doing what you claim, I’d love to hear the mechanism in detail and the steps to replicate it.
I mean, I’m not sure why this conversation even needs to get this far. If I write an article about the history of Disney movies, and make it very clear the way I got all of those movies was to pirate them, this conversation is over pretty quick. OpenAI and most of the LLMs aren’t doing anything different. The Times isn’t Wikipedia, most of their stuff is behind a paywall with pretty clear terms of service and nothing entitles OpenAI to that content. OpenAI’s argument is “well, we’re pirating everything so it’s okay.” The output honestly seems irrelevant to me, they never should have had the content to begin with.
That’s not the claim that they’re making. They’re arguing that OpenAI retains their work they made publicly available, which OpenAI claims is fair use because it’s wholly transformative in the form of nodes, weights and biases, and that they don’t store those articles in a database for reuse. But their other argument is that they created a system that threatens their business which is just ludicrous.
So it’s content laundering
What a colorful mischaracterization. It sounds clever at face value but it’s really naive. If anything about this is deceptive, it’s the lengths that people go to to slander what they dislike.
Actually content laundering is the best term I’ve heard to describe the process. Just like money laundering, you no longer know the source and know it’s technically legal to use and distribute.
I mean, if the copyrighted content wasn’t so critical, they would train models without it. Their essentially derivative works, but no one wants to acknowledge it because it would either require changing our copyright laws or make this potentially lucrative and important work illegal.
Content laundering is not a good way to describe it because it’s misleading as it oversimplifies and mischaracterizes what a language model actually does. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how it works. Training language models is typically a transparent and well-documented process as described by the mountains of research over the past decades. The real value comes from the weights of the nodes in the neural network and not the source that it spits out in its entirety when it was trained. The source material is evaluated and wholly transformed into new data in the form of nodes and weights. The original content does not exist as it was within the network because there’s no way to encode it that way. It’s a statistical system that compounds information.
And while LLMs do have the capacity to create derivative works in other ways, it’s not all that they do, or what they always do. It’s only one of the many functions that it has. What you say would probably be true if it was only trained on a single source, but that’s not even feasible. But when you train it on millions of sources, what remains are the overall patterns of language within those works. It’s much more sophisticated and flexible than what you describe.
So no, if it was cut and dry there would be grounds for a legitimate lawsuit. The problem is that people are arguing points that do not apply but sound reasonable when they haven’t seen a neural network work under the hood. If anything, new laws need to be created to address what LLMs do if you’re so concerned about proper compensation.
I am familiar with how LLMs work and are trained. I’ve been using transformers for years.
The core question I’d ask is, if the copyrighted material isn’t essential to the model, why don’t they just train the models without that data? If it is core to the model, then can you really say they aren’t derivative of that content?
I’m not saying that the models don’t do something more, just that the more is built upon copyrighted material. In any other commercial situation, you’d have to license/get approval for the underlying content if you were packaging it up. When sampling music, for example, the output will differ greatly from the original song, but because you are building off someone else’s work you must compensate them.
Its why content laundering is a great term. The models intermix so much data that it’s hard to know if the content originated from copyrighted materials. Just like how money laundering is trying to make it difficult to determine if the money comes from illicit sources.
I feel most people critical of AI don’t know how a neural network works…
That is exactly what’s going on here. Or they hate it enough that they don’t mind making stuff up or mischaracterizing what it does. Seems to be a common thread on the Fediverse. It’s not the first time this week I’ve seen it.
It’s great how for most of us we’re taught that just changing the order of words is still plagerism. For them they frequently end up using the exact same words as other things and people still argue it somehow is intelligent and somehow not plagerism.
“Changing the order of words” is what it does? That’s news to me. And do you have examples of it “using the exact same words as other things” without prompt manipulation?
Why does the prompting matter? If I “prompt” a band to play copyrighted music does that mean they get a free pass?
That’s not a very good analogy because the band would be reproducing an entire work of art which an LLM does not and cannot. And by prompt manipulation I mean purposely making it seem like the LLM is doing something it wouldn’t do on its own. The operating word is seem, which is what I meant by manipulation. The prompting here is irrelevant, but how it’s done is. So unless The Times releases the steps they used to get ChatGPT to output what it did, you can’t really claim that that’s what it does.
In a blog post, OpenAI said the Times “is not telling the full story.” It took particular issue with claims that its ChatGPT AI tool reproduced Times stories verbatim, arguing that the Times had manipulated prompts to include regurgitated excerpts of articles. “Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts,” OpenAI said.
If you passed them a sheet of music I’d say that’s on you, it would be your responsibility to not sell recordings of them playing it.
Just like if I typed the first chapter of Harry Potter into word it is not Microsoft’s intent to breach copyright, it would have been my intent to make it do it. It would be my responsibility not to sell that first chapter, and they should come after me if I did, even though MS is a corporation who supplied the tools.
If you have enough money, you can do whatever you want!
OpenAI isn’t really proven as legal. They claim it is, and it’s very difficult to mount a challenge, but there definitely is an argument that they have no fair use protection - their “research” is in fact development of a commercial product.
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Their argument is that the copying to their training database is “research”. This would be a legal fair use of unauthorised copying. However, normally with research you make a prototype, and that prototype is distinctly different from the final commercial product. With LLM’s the prototype is the finished commercial product, they keep adding to it, thus it isn’t normal fair use.
When a court considers fair use, the first step is the type of use. The exemptions are education, research, news, comment, or criticism. Next, they consider the nature of the use, in particular whether it is commercial. Calling their copying “research” is a bit of a stretch - it’s not like they’re writing academic papers and making their data publicly available for review from other scientists - and their use is absolutely commercial. However, it needs to go before a judge to make the decision and it’s very difficult for someone to show a cause of action, if only because all their copying is done secretly behind closed doors.
The output of the AI itself is a bit more difficult. The database ChatGPT runs off of does not include the whole works it learned from - it’s in the training database where all the copying occurs. However, ChatGPT and other LLM’s can sometimes still manage to reproduce the original works, and arguably this should be an offense. If a human being reads a book and then later writes a story that replicates significant parts of the book, then they would be guilty of plagiarism and copyright infringement, regardless of whether they genuinely believe they were coming up with original ideas.
And people wonder why there’s so much push back against everything corps/gov does these days. They do not act in a manner which encourages trust.
What do you expect when people support 90 year copyrights after death?
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They are also right.
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It’s self evident. You’re trolling. And you’re digging in to your trolling.
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That’s a pretty strong accusation. You seem to like to wade through people’s post history but to my cursory glance nothing would indicate this poster is a troll.
You understand AI posts frequently surface on this platform and people will engage with those posts even if they disagree with you?
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Yeah you keep spamming that screen shot. Idk I’m not seeing it. I read the thread you’re posting and it seems like you’re just digging in and insisting that someone that disagrees with you must be a troll.
For what it’s worth, you made the same accusation against me yesterday and after I think I pretty effectively (and unnecessarily I might add) defended myself you deleted those posts. Making spurious accusations like that (and, as I read it, this) are also trollish behavior that doesn’t further any discussion. I’ve looked in your thread you’re posting. You come out flying with accusations based on extremely flimsy evidence. I think OPs responses seemed entirely warranted.
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No, see, it actually isn’t self evident. After being accused of being disingenuous because he only talked about open source in the context of AI — again almost the verbatim ridiculous accusation you lobbed at me before cowardly deleting it - he asked for a citation relevant to the issue and someone sent a CNN article about Duolingo laying off staff. That isn’t the gotcha you think it is. It doesn’t “destroy my reputation” lmao to point out that you are, in fact, acting like a troll. This is a pattern of yours. Be better.
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If this ends with LLMs getting shutdown to some degree, I wonder if it’s going to result in something like a Pirate Bai.
It’ll result in the industry moving to nations with more permissive scraping laws (like Japan) or less respect for Western copyright (Russia, China).
Yeah, realistically what will happen is china will get far ahead in natural language computing which will benefit it’s economy, everyone who demanded chat GPT be stopped because they’re scared of change will demand the government do something to catch up and they’ll write exemptions into the law.
More likely they’ll realise this is the obvious way things will go and the only legislation will make it harder for open source and community run ai, but hopefully not significantly.
The next round of ai gen will start reaching consumer space soon. CAD, especially for electronics and structural design (E.g. creating the right amount of supports to hold a given load). They’ll scare a few corporations into pushing for legislation but I think the utility will be far clearer.
Are there any historical examples of a technology as valuable as LLMs being effectively shut down?
Nuclear energy.
Sort of joking.
Stem cell research
Nice example. I think embryotic is the asterisk to it though.
Great question, but unfortunately it’s out of both my knowledge and will-to-research base.
Not to be confused with, “Pirate Bae”, the pirate dating site for those endowed with abundant doubloons.
Doubt it. GenAI requires a shitton of resources, both in storage and for processing. Training a GenAI requires clusters upon clusters of NPUs and/or GPUs, even more than crypto miners and 3D renderers. The full storage requirements are proportional to the amount of training data you give, so expect them at least to be dozens of gigabytes long.
I doubt AI companies do it “for science” (yeah, right) so if they’re shit down by a court of law they’ll just shut the thing down. They can upload the code somewhere, but without training data their engine is useless.
The IP system, which goes to great lengths to block things like open-access scientific publications, is borked borked borked borked borked.
If OpenAI and other generative AI projects are the means by which we finally break it so we can have culture and a public domain again, well, we had to nail Capone with tax evasion.
Yes, industrialists want to use AI [exactly they way they want to use every other idea – plausible or not] to automate more of their industries so they can pay fewer people less money for more productivity. And this is a problem of which generative AI figures centrally, but it’s not really all that new, and eventually we’re going to have to force our society to recognize that it works for the public and not money. I don’t think AI is going to break the system and lead us to communist revolution ( The owning class will tremble…! ) But eventually it will be 1789 all over again. Or we’ll crush the fash and realize the only way we can get the fash to not come back is by restoring and extending FDR’s new deal.
I am skeptical the latter can happen without piles of elite heads and rivers of politician blood.
Thats actually not a bad idea, train a model with all the data in scihub a then release the model to the public
It would still be useless, the thing would just produce bullshit papers.
Actually a good point.
That would likely be explicitly illegal if the NYT case succeeds (and it isn’t fraud as OpenAI alleges)
This is just the most inefficient zip file ever created
We need to ban the publishing business from academic stuff. Have the Universities host a site that’s free access. They can also better run the peer review system and the journals would also also no longer control what research sees the light of day even behind a paywall.
How would you publish if you’re not a part of a major research institution? Los Alamos National Lab could host its own papers just fine, but what about small-time labs? I know of at least one person who doesn’t even officially work in science but publishes original research they do in their free time.
The journal system still provides a service, even if they over-charge for access. The peer review system has value. Imagine if there was zero barrier to publish. As a reader, you’d have to wade through piles of trash to find decent science.
Where would you find it all? Currently we use journal aggregators, whose service also has value and costs money. Are you really going to go to every university’s website looking for research relevant to your area? We could do that again, but with everyone responsibile for publishing their own work, well, who gets indexed with the aggregators?
You get published with a university instead of a for profit publishing system. And universities would get a good or bad reputation for their peer review, just like journals. The aggregator could easily be run by a coalition of universities with government grants to make the maintenance and upkeep free to the users and universities.
We do not have to lock research behind paywalls.
The problem isn’t just publishing though, it’s academia as well. Scientists are incentivized to publish in “prestigious” closed access journals such as Nature. They are led to believe it’s better for their career than publishing in open access journals such as PLOS One. As such, groundbreaking papers often get paywalled. Universities then feel obligated to pay outrageous subscription fees to access them.
Yup. And this would change that, giving universities more influence.
Like https://doaj.org/
Yeah, but did SciHub pay Nigerians a pittance to look at and read about child rape? Because- wait, I have no idea what I’m even arguing. Fuck OpenAI though.
OpenAI did those subhuman training of ChatGPT in Kenya, not Nigeria. And since the Kenyan govt is a western lapdog these days, nothing would ever come out of that.
Oh, well that makes it okay then. My mistake.
