All advertising is emotionally manipulative, but just because I bought something that was advertised to me doesn't mean that I consider it 'the best possible purchase'.
It could have been the purchase of least resistance. It could have been the best at maximizing some particular utility. It could have been a purchase of the most recent thing that was on my mind. My decisions, unlike that of these theoretical EAs don't solely consist of maximizing some global 'goodness' utility function.
When I gave $500 to the town's theatre this year, it wasn't because 'I was trying to maximize the best way to help people, and I erroneously made a sub-optimal choice, because I based it on feelings'.
Paperclip-maximization was the furthest thing from my mind at the time. Anyone looking at my decision, and concluding based on it that I was buying into some Big Lie is completely nuts.
The subtext here is that some people hate it when the poor can enjoy things. I know it sounds like a joke and that it's hard to believe, but that's what's happening.
Huh? It's the less wealthy in particular who benefit the most from choosing paths less traveled, finding places to eat where the food doesn't carry a 2x or 3x tourist markup and the ATMs are not rigged to scam you. Often these paths are literally a quarter hour away from the worst tourist traps.
Not spending your own money to buy tools that help you at work. I have the impression, and that could be totally wrong, that it would be far more “normal” for Americans do to so to get ahead.
But my man, there's a thing called an electric car and you said a "war on cars". Be more specific if you're actually saying there's a "war on GAS cars".
Electric cars cost like double what a normal car costs, thus making sure only the wealthy can afford to drive one, while the plebs can get around in public transportation or whatever.
The average cost of a new gas powered car is about $48k in the United States and the average cost of a new electric car is about $53k. Neither is affordable but used Nissan Leafs are available in the sub $10k range. Anything else you forgot to mention?
"unauthorized" is a weasel word because it implies that it should be necessary for the developer to ask David Attenborough for authorization to create a clone of his voice using AI.
I wouldn't call it a weasel word because it describes accurately the fact nobody gave them the authorization to use the likeness of Attenborough, and there are laws to protect people's likeness in multiple jurisdictions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights) that might require such authorization (whether they could be applied in the case of AI remains to be tested, but apparently most of them do not question the "means" to impersonate but the act of it).
It raises an interesting discussion about this though, how is this different from someone making an impression of him and doing a comedy show of it for example. They also had to listen to him for hours to reproduce the voice correctly, are they now infringing some copyright when they use this voice?
To me, as long as you clearly state that this is an impersonation/parody, and there is no deception, I do not really see a reason to protect this, even for music. But I'd like to hear arguments for a protection and how it would be enforced, how do you judge of the likeness, how do you know/prove which source material was used for training for example.
How is it different than an impersonator? 1. Let's say there's 1000 people that could, or would, want to truly impersonate him in the world as a job. Now there's 8 billion who don't need rest, who don't need to practice, who won't be indistinguishable from the real thing.
Depends on how it’s represented. If you booked David Attenborough and an impersonator showed instead you’d be annoyed. If TV shows started using an impersonator instead of Attenborough but said it was him both the audience and Attenborough would be annoyed when found out.
I'm not sure what you mean here but let me make my point to the "no big deal" proponents.
Would you be ok if AI was used to impersonate you across the internet? Would you mind if I made a twitter account in your name and phone calls with your voice or upload to Youtube videos of yourself? I wouldn't do anything illegal or to make any money. It would just be entertainment impersonating your likeness and saying whatever I would want you to say.
It is ambiguous because it makes it sound like we are talking legality here, but there's nothing illegal about making a project like this if you do not profit from it. Therefore, it is a weasel word.
If this could be created without using recordings of his voice to train the model, then sure. I agree a "sound-alike" like that is fair game.
But since actual recordings of his voice were used in order to train the model to recreate the sound, inflection, cadence, etc...it should be required to get authorization to use those recordings for this purpose.
I mean, yeah? That's also something we need to seriously consider. These tools have the ability to copy the labor and property of others in a way that is economically important and socially challenging, and we don't yet have a legal framework to handle it.
One of the popular sentiments here seems to be that training AI should not be treated any different than a human understanding & learning the source material.
Going by that logic, can the AI here be considered a "person" performing mimicry after being "inspired" by Attenborough ?
Should an actor playing a public figure in a biopic have to get permission to study the subject's voice from copyrighted sources in order to reproduce it for the film (without AI)?
Can actors audio-visually mimic their characters with increasingly convincing realism, and can they be artificially scaled, duplicated, extended, and applied for just the cost of a bit of hardware and electricity?
It is not sensible to hand wave the "human like" learning process and ignore economic reality. This area requires careful thought about how our notions of individual rights apply to new technologies, and what kind of economic system can exist as a result.
Does fair use apply here? (I don't know) It's not like the author narrates a full-blown wildlife movie with the voice of David Attenborough. It's just a funny demo which doesn't depend on the specific voice (could be anyone), and also makes it clear the voice is synthetic.
If you use a small clip of Brad Pitt in a 10 sec ad without his permission, he will probably sue you and win. So I don't think fair use is going to protect you.
Hold on, are we looking at the same video and Twitter message? [1] He clearly states what he's doing, and in the video he launches some program that appears to speak in Attenborough's voice. How clear is clear enough?
By this metric I should not ask for permission to train a model on your liking and share with your wife generated pictures of you having sex with other women
I’d agree that Google Chrome was noticeably faster than Firefox up until around a decade ago. However, I haven’t noticed it to be any faster since then. What makes web browsing faster for me is the use of web extensions that disable the downloading of unnecessary resources and/or the execution of pointless Javascript, e.g., NoScript, uMatrix, uBlock, Privacy Badger, etc – the same extensions that will have their abilities greatly reduced by Manifest v3.
Me too and I don't really understand why. On Windows, pressing F12 to open Dev Tools takes a good five seconds in Edge but takes fractions of a second in Firefox. And page renders feel faster, although apparently they actually aren't in controlled experiments.
Maybe one of the extensions I typically use in both works differently in Firefox.
I'm on Linux, and Firefox's performance is still behind Chromium. Mozilla only recently enabled hardware acceleration. There are benchmarks in which Firefox beats Chrome (https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/benchmarks/overview?numDays... has an overview) but in general Chrome is faster.
On Windows and macOS Firefox is a bit more competitive, but important benchmarks such as JetStream and Speedometer still have Firefox easily beat (note the inverted score axes).
That doesn't mean Firefox is slow per se, it just means Chromium (and WebKit) are faster.
On Android I use Firefox for its addon support, but the UI is notably more glitchy and buggy than Chrome's.
These web apps are quite usable on Chrome and useless lag fests on Firefox.
Do I prefer the modern "let's ship a JS renderer with every webpage" approach? No, definitely not. Unfortunately, quite a few web applications and websites u visit disagree with me.
There's also a perceptable difference in terms of browser responsiveness outside the page itself. Firefox seems to take longer to process UI input in my experience, for reasons I don't entirely get. There's a slight but visible delay before the page starts rendering that Chrome doesn't have, and that small delay adds up when you're working in web UIs fir a significant part of the day.
Strange, on Linux I've found Firefox to be just as fast as Chrome. Granted, I've had all the hardware accel stuff force-enabled for years now, with no issues (on Intel iGPUs), so maybe that's why I haven't noticed any slowness.
This is the opposite of my experience on android. Firefox with uBlock Origin is the only way to get some sites to load in any reasonable timeframe. The difference can be measured in 10s of seconds, and is more noticeable with worse hardware.
Have you used it recently, or just years ago? It definitely used to be very slow, but since ~2 years ago it's very good, and my go to browser (my phone is not high end, by the way)
I haven't noticed any speed differences between Chrome and Firefox for quite some time now (Linux here, so maybe it's different on Windows or macOS).
And I haven't found the Google services integration to be all that deep or interesting to matter. In fact, I'd found the opposite to be true: it's gotten in the way. Having the browser log into your Google Account directly has led to some confusing behavior, especially when signing into a second account via some webapp, which sometimes changes how the browser is signed in.
Regardless, I think we all would be better off with a bit less integration of Google services in our lives.
Citation needed for that number, I suppose, because the number is absolutely made up. There is no way to determine the cost of the externalities of fossil fuels (if they exist). Even if we were to say that CO2 is causing global warming so we need to remove it from the atmosphere, such technology does not yet exist, so we don't know how much it would cost.
If you're using a processor that was manufactured in the last decade, it was built using machines that the entire world depends upon that are only designed and produced in the EU.
It isn't true outside of the US because salaries outside the US make iphones luxury items.
An iphone costs 1 month of salary in Spain and Spain has the highest youth unemployment rate of the EU (and those who are employed most likely make peanuts). How are young people going to afford it? If an iphone cost 200€, how many people would even use android to begin with?
Of minimum salary, although there is the iPhone SE, which is ~500 euro.
Regardless, it always baffles me how people skimps on stuff that they use continuously through the day, every day.
When someone would tell me how expensive an iPhone is, which would last five, six years, just to go and purchase Chinese off brand phone from AliExpress for a couple hundred, that would last a couple years tops, I have to laugh. It's like calling someone out for buying a slightly expensive Toyota, while driving a Chevrolet.
