The Bookseller: Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff

Penguin Random House (PRH) has amended its copyright wording across all imprints globally, confirming it will appear “in imprint pages across our markets”. The new wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems”, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.

Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isn't gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. it's time to give Big AI a wedgie.

Forget Gladwell

All nonfiction writers can end up writing incorrect or controversial things, but why does every Gladwell book push half-formed and inaccurate theories? For years, my loose feeling about Gladwell was that he writes like someone who doesn’t care about being correct, which is not a way I would describe any other author I've encountered. There is something uniquely odd about his work.

They’re not cheering. Evangelical anti-abortion activists have long targeted IVF and it’s been practically banned in at least one US state.

Just amazing that he worked for a YC-backed startup ("Warp, accounting and payroll for founders") whose social media team (prolly this dude) just handed out affiliation icons to all manners of like-minded twitter racists.

Thank for letting me know there are other people indifferent to dark mode. Sometimes I feel I am the only one.

Still unclear how OpenAI declaring they've created an AGI (and getting this adjudicated as "true") and thus being released from their MSFT partnership helps OpenAI. They're just lost all their compute, and will have a worse negotiating position from which to get more compute. What's the upside?

It was an interesting read, thanks for posting it.

NYT: "Microsoft and OpenAI’s Close Partnership Shows Signs of Fraying" (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/technology/microsoft-openai-partnership-deal.html)

Archive: https://archive.ph/Bas23

HN link from whence I got this, have not mined this for sneers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41878281

edit oh wait found one

OpenAI's revenue isn't from advertising, it should be slightly easier for them to resist the call of enshittification this early in the company history.

Can't enshittify that which is already shit

Twice in the last week I've had Claude refuse to answer questions about a specific racial separatist group (nothing about their ideology, just their name and facts about their membership) and questions about unconventional ways to assess job candidates. Both times I turned to ChatGPT and it gave me an answer immediately

Just a normal hackernews, testing if the models they use are racist

Well, at this point most new data being created is conversations with chatgpt, seeing as how stack overflow and reddit are increasingly useless, so their conversation logs are their moat.

Worldcoin has been around for longer than OpenAI. Sama is the OG pivot-from-crypto-to-AI.

Kinda surprised World(Coin) was still ongoing, thought saltman would have quietly buried the project now he's busy shilling ChatGPT

Our local Swedish right-wingers in gov have a chubby for nukes too[1], because their main motivation besides hating on brown people is pissing off Greens. But in the Swedish way they handed this off to a researcher ("utredning") who found out that to get the industry on board you need a) rock-solid political promises (so need to get the Social Democrats at least on board) and b) have a price guarantee for power for at least a decade, along with massive government loan guarantees.

It's gonna be hard to get voters interested in 10 new reactor sites (NIMBY gets supercharged when it comes to nukes) if it slightly pushes up lending rates and power bills.

[1] the right-wing part of the opposition social democrats like them too to be fair

Thanks for posting this good collection of links. HN has as hard-on for SMRs and as a first-order approximation that means they're wrong, but it's good to have something more than vibes backing it up.

Yeah, I'm no longer worried that LLMs will take my job (nor ofc that AGI will kill us all) Instead the lasting legacy of GenAI will be a elevated background level of crud and untruth, an erosion of trust in media in general, and less free quality stuff being available. It's a bit like draining the Aral Sea, a vibrant ecosystem will be permanently destroyed in the short-sighted pursuit of "development".

oh hey that would be my comment 😁

this demented take on using GenAI to create documentation for open source projects

https://lobste.rs/s/rmbos5/large_language_models_reduce_public#c_j8boat

the lobste.rs thread is a trash fire too.

of note is that the Stallman defenders from about 3 years back (when he waded in unprompted in a mailing list meant for undergrads at MIT and was pretty damn sure that Marvin Minsky never had sex with one of Epstein's victims, and if he did, it would have been because he was sure she wasn't underage) have registered https://stallman-report.com which redirects to their lengthy apologia. Could be worth taking into account fi you want to spread the original around

Matt fires back: https://ma.tt/2024/10/on-dhh/

(I haven't read any of these peices, to be honest. There's so much else that's crazy and only so many hours in the day)

yeah, there's a stench of desperation from the defenders

of course, as with crypto, there are uses (in the case of crypto , nothing legitimate). And it will be going to be a fallback for fondlers to point them out (for example, I believe that auto-generated audiobooks are viable, if they're generated from actual books)

Any mild pushback to the claims of LLM companies sure bring out the promptfondlers on lobste.rs

https://lobste.rs/s/qcppwf/llms_don_t_do_formal_reasoning_is_huge

Plenty of agreement, but also a lot of "what is reasoning, really" and "humans are dumb too, so it's not so surprisingly GenAIs are too!". This is sure a solid foundation for multi-billion startups, yes sirree.

To my mind, the cover of "researchers" using the public internet to seed products commercialized by OpenAI and friends is the biggest betrayal of fair use in recent memory. The big companies cynically exploited the research exception to fair use and possibly destroyed in the future.