• 2 Posts
  • 111 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Outer Worlds has no space-based content. Yes, you have a spaceship, but it’s essentially a fast-travel device. One of the locations is a space station, but it’s no different than a large building (e.g. it’s not shaped like a torus or anything interesting like that).

    Outer Worlds is a really fun take on the Firefly space western concept, though, as long as you understand all of your activities will take place on worlds/moons with basically the same gravity & atmosphere.




  • If I remember correctly, at the time Valve justified the 30% by pointing out that Apple was charging the same for music and video content. And Valve immediately started building value-added services like forums, updaters, multiplayer support, achievements, etc. to justify the price.

    If you compare what Valve was doing to the physical media distribution methods of the period, it was a MASSIVE improvement. Back then, you could sell 10000 units to Ingram Micro or PC Mall, or whatever, and you only got paid if they sold. And any unsold inventory would be destroyed and the reseller would never pay for it. And if you actually wanted anything other than a single-line entry in their catalogs, you paid a promotional fee. Those video games featured with a standup display or a poster in the window at the computer store? None of that was free; the developer was nickeled and dimed for every moment their game was featured in any premium store space.




  • Eh, I was there. The games were OK.

    The biggest change is that we put up with a lot more repetitive gameplay back then, just because that’s how games were and there wasn’t enough horsepower to make complex stuff.

    Today, you blow through a level of a modern first person game, or whatever, and see only a tiny fraction of what the game makers created for you. I played Titanfall 2 for the first time recently, and after playing the same level a few times, I noticed that a room that appears only briefly as you take an elevator past it has an extension cord coiled up on the floor. You can only see it if you look down as the elevator goes up, so you can see the floor of the room.

    Old games didn’t have the room for those kinds of indulgences.








  • it’s basically impossible to tell where parts of the model came from

    AIs are deterministic.

    1. Train the AI on data without the copyrighted work.

    2. Train the same AI on data with the copyrighted work.

    3. Ask the two instances the same question.

    4. The difference is the contribution of the copyrighted work.

    There may be larger questions of precisely how an AI produces one answer when trained with a copyrighted work, and another answer when not trained with the copyrighted work. But we know why the answers are different, and we can show precisely what contribution the copyrighted work makes to the response to any prompt, just by running the AI twice.





  • There is literally not one single piece of art that is not derived from prior art in the past thousand years.

    This is false. Somebody who looks at a landscape, for example, and renders that scene in visual media is not deriving anything important from prior art. Taking a video of a cat is an original creation. This kind of creation happens every day.

    Their output may seem similar to prior art, perhaps their methods were developed previously. But the inputs are original and clean. They’re not using some existing art as the sole inputs.

    AI only uses existing art as sole inputs. This is a crucial distinction. I would have no problem at all with AI that worked exclusively from verified public domain/copyright not enforced and original inputs, although I don’t know if I’d consider the outputs themselves to be copyrightable (as that is a right attached to a human author).

    Straight up copying someone else’s work directly

    And that’s what the training set is. Verbatim copies, often including copyrighted works.

    That’s ultimately the question that we’re faced with. If there is no useful output without the copyrighted inputs, how can the output be non-infringing? Copyright defines transformative work as the product of human creativity, so we have to make some decisions about AI.