Frankly this isn’t even half as good as their off-the-cuff comments two years ago. There’s a lot of poser energy here as they try to invoke the concepts of “senior engineer” and “CEO” as desirable, achievable, precise vocations rather than job titles. In particular, this bit:

Look, CEOs, I’m one of you so I get it.

This is one of the most out-of-touch positions I’ve ever seen. In no particular order: CEOs generally don’t understand, CEOs form a Big Club and you ain’t in it, CEOs don’t actually have power in their organization but delegate power flowing from the board of directors, CEOs are inherently disrespectable because their jobs are superfluous, and finally CEOs don’t take business advice from one-person companies unless it’s through a paid contract.

The job title naturally associated to a one-person limited-liability company is usually “manager” or “owner”, and it says nothing about job responsibilities.

Finally, while I think that their zest for fiction is admirable, it would help to critically consider what they’re endorsing. Dune’s Butlerian Jihad resulted in neo-Catholicism which effuses the narrative; it’s not a desirable outcome. Paraphrasing the Unabomber is fairly poor taste, especially considering that they are sitting in a city in Canada and not a shack in the wilderness of Montana.

Well, yes. It’s not a new concept; it was a staple of Cold War sci-fi like The Three Stigmata, and we know from studies of e.g. Pentacostal worship that it is pretty easy to broadcast a suggestion to a large group of vulnerable people and get at least some of them to radically alter their worldview. We also know a reliable formula for changing people’s beliefs; we use the same formula in sensitivity training as we did in MKUltra, including belief challenges, suspension of disbelief, induction/inception, lovebombing, and depersonalization. We also have a constant train of psychologists attempting to nudgelord society, gently pushing mass suggestions and trying to slowly change opinions at scale.

Fundamentally your sneer is a little incomplete. MKUltra wasn’t just about forcing people to challenge their beliefs via argumentation and occult indoctrination, but also psychoactive inhibition-lowering drugs. In this setting, the drugs are administered after institutionalization.

Read carefully. On p1-2, the judge makes it clear that “the incentive for human beings to create artistic and scientific works” is “the ability of copyright holders to make money from their works,” to the law, there isn’t any other reason to publish art. This is why I’m so dour on copyright, folks; it’s not for you who love to make art and prize it for its cultural impact and expressive power, but for folks who want to trade art for money.

On p3, a contrast appears between Chhabria and Alsup (yes, that Alsup); the latter knows what a computer is and how to program it, and this makes him less respectful of copyright overall. Chhabria doesn’t really hide that they think Meta didn’t earn their summary judgement, presumably because they disagree with Alsup about whether this is a “competitive or creative displacement.” That’s fair given the central pillar of the decision on p4:

Llama is not capable of generating enough text from the plantiffs’ books to matter, and the plaintiffs are not entitled to the market for licensing their works as AI training data.

An analogy might make this clearer. Suppose a transient person on a street corner is babbling. Occasionally they spout what sounds like a quote from a Star Wars film. Intrigued, we prompt the transient to recite the entirety of Star Wars, and they proceed to mostly recreate the original film, complete with sound effects and voice acting, only getting a few details wrong. Does it matter whether the transient paid to watch the original film (as opposed to somebody else paying the fee)? No, their recreation might be candid and yet not faithful enough to infringe. Is Lucas entitled to a licensing fee for every time the transient happens to learn something about Star Wars? Eh, not yet, but Disney’s working on it. This is why everybody is so concerned about whether the material was pirated, regardless of how it was paid for; they want to say that what’s disallowed is not the babbling on the street but the access to the copyrighted material itself.

Almost every technical claim on p8-9 is simplified to the point of incorrectness. They are talking points about Transformers turned into aphorisms and then axioms. The wrongest claim is on p9, that “to be able to generate a wide range of text … an LLM’s training data set must be large and diverse” (it need only be diverse, not large) followed by the claim that an LLM’s “memory” must be trained on books or equivalent “especially valuable training data” in order to “work with larger amounts of text at once” (conflating hyperparameters with learned parameters.) These claims show how the judge fails to actually engage with the technical details and thus paints with a broad brush dipped in the wrong color.

On p12, the technical wrongness overflows. Any language model can be forced to replicate a copyrighted work, or to avoid replication, by sampling techniques; this is why perplexity is so important as a metric. What would have genuinely been interesting is whether Llama is low-perplexity on the copyrighted works, not the rate of exact replications, since that’s the key to getting Llama to produce unlimited Harry Potter slash or whatever.

On p17 the judge ought to read up on how Shannon and Markov initially figured out information theory. LLMs read like Shannon’s model, and in that sense they’re just like humans: left to right, top to bottom, chunking characters into words, predicting shapes and punctuation. Pretending otherwise is powdered-wig sophistry or perhaps robophobia.

On p23 Meta cites fuckin’ Sega v. Accolade! This is how I know y’all don’t read the opinions; you’d be hyped too. I want to see them cite Galoob next. For those of you who don’t remember the 90s, the NES and Genesis were video game consoles, and these cases established our right to emulate them and write our own games for them.

p28-36 is the judge giving free legal advice. I find their line of argumentation tenuous. Consider Minions; Minions are bad, Minions are generic, and Minions can be used to crank out infinite amounts of slop. But, as established at the top, whoever owns Minions has the right to profit from Minions, and that is the lone incentive by which they go to market. However, Minions are arbitrary; there’s no reason why they should do well in the market, given how generic and bad they are. So if we accept their argument then copyright becomes an excuse for arbitrary winners to extract rent from cultural artifacts. For a serious example, look up the ironic commercialization of the Monopoly brand.

Top-level commenters would do well to read Authors Guild v Google, two decades ago. They’re also invited to rend their garments and gnash their teeth at Google, if they like.

Last Week Tonight’s rant of the week is about AI slop. A Youtube video is available here. Their presentation is sufficiently down-to-earth to be sharable with parents and extended family, focusing on fake viral videos spreading via Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest; and dissecting several examples of slop in order to help inoculate the audience.

What a deeply dishonorable lawsuit. The complaint is essentially that Disney and Universal deserve to be big powerful movie studios that employ and systematically disenfranchise “millions of” artists (p8).

Disney claims authorship over Darth Vader (Lucas) and Yoda (Oz), Elsa and Ariel (Andersen), folk characters Aladdin, Mulan, and Snow White; Lightning McQueen & Buzz Lightyear (Lasseter et al), Sully (Gerson & Stanton), Iron Man (Lee, Kirby, et al), and Homer Simpson (Groening). Disney not only did not design or produce any of these characters, but Disney purchased those rights. I will give Universal partial credit for not claiming to invent any of their infamous movie monsters, but they do claim to have created Shrek (Stieg). Still, this is some original-character-do-not-steal snottiness; these avaricious executives and attorneys appropriated art from artists and are claiming it as their own so that they can sue another appropriator.

Here is a sample of their attitude, p16 of the original complaint:

Disney’s copyright registrations for the entertainment properties in The Simpsons franchise encompass the central characters within.

See, they’re the original creator and designated benefactor, because they have Piece of Paper, signed by Government Authority, and therefore they are Owner. Who the fuck are Matt Groening or Tracey Ullman?

I will not contest Universal’s claim to Minions.

One weakness of the claim is that it’s not clear whether Midjourney infringes, Midjourney’s subscribers infringe, or Midjourney infringes when collaborating with its subscribers. It seems like they’re going to argue that Midjourney commits the infringing act, although p104 contains hedges that will allow Disney to argue either way. Another weakness is the insistence that Midjourney could filter infringing queries, but chooses not to; this is a standard part of amplifying damages in copyright claims but might not stand up under scrutiny since Midjourney can argue that it’s hard to e.g. tell the difference between infringing queries and parodic or satirical queries which infringe but are permitted by fair use. On the other hand, this lawsuit could be an attempt to open a new front in Disney’s long-standing attempt to eradicate fair use.

As usual, I’m not defending Midjourney, who I think stand on their own demerits. But I’m not ever going to suck Disney dick given what they’ve done to the animation community. I wish y’all would realize the folly of copyright already.