The Verge
That’s because there is no actual precedent for saying that scraping data to train an AI is fair use; all of these companies are relying on ancient internet law cases that allowed search engines and social media platforms to exist in the first place. It’s messy, and it feels like all of those decisions are up for grabs in what promises to be a decade of litigation.
The current round of language and image model speculation is based on the premise that using any public data for training is fair use not a massive copyright violation.
Washington Post
The Post’s analysis suggests more legal challenges may be on the way: The copyright symbol — which denotes a work registered as intellectual property — appears more than 200 million times in the C4 data set.
This humble website is included in the C4 corpus. You can use this tool to see if your copyright has also been violated.
IndieWire
During a Q&A session held on the Warner Bros. Burbank studio immediately after the conference, Max and HBO Content Head Casey Bloys declined to answer a question from a reporter regarding Rowling’s controversial reputation and how it might affect the show.

“No, I don’t think this is the forum,” Bloys said during the Q&A. “That’s a very online conversation, very nuanced and complicated and not something we’re going to get into.”
It is not nuanced. They're doing business with someone who thinks trans people shouldn't exist. Time to cancel my HBO Max subscription.

Update (4/21): If you're saying to yourself, 'what's wrong with JKR?', ContraPoints posted an amazing summary with historical context: The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.
Slate
This story is a perfect example, in miniature, of how Thomas’ network of benefactors ensure the justice’s billionaire lifestyle stays off the books. Paoletta testifies before Congress that ethics reforms are evil; Crow funds the Republican lawmakers who ensure ethics reforms don’t pass; and nobody knows the extent of Thomas’ unceasing stream of gifts until ProPublica reporters wrangle the details from yacht crews and flight records.
Also a perfect example of elite impunity. Isn’t our country founded on doing away with elite impunity? This whole thing feels anti-American.
New York Times
The additional power use across the country also causes as much carbon pollution as adding 3.5 million gas-powered cars to America’s roads, according to an analysis by WattTime, a nonprofit tech company. Many of the Bitcoin operations promote themselves as environmentally friendly and set up in areas rich with renewable energy, but their power needs are far too great to be satisfied by those sources alone.
Bitcoin is a waste of resources in so many ways. We need to shut it down.
The Guardian
On Friday, the Washingtonian published pictures of Thomas’s friend’s collection of Nazi artefacts, which includes a signed copy of Hitler’s memoir, Mein Kampf.
Wouldn’t be believable as a fictional villain because it’s too cliché.
Slate
This is all completely absurd, an outrageous abuse of power that no judge has ever even attempted before. Challenges to agency actions have a six-year statute of limitations. That means plaintiffs get a full six years to file a lawsuit, after which point they’ve waited too long. It has, just to reiterate, been more than two decades since the FDA approved mifepristone.
We shouldn't have a system where one judge in Texas can kill people across the country by denying them preventative healthcare. I know I say this a lot but please vote for people who care about other people.
Dan York
If we as technologists want to help the broader public understand these AI systems, both their opportunities and challenges, then we need to speak in plain language.

I do think we need to go back to the beginning and just say “ChatGPT lies”.
I’m guilty of trying to find the perfect word with the correct nuance or shade of meaning to describe a situation. Sometimes that impulse works against clarity.
Business Insider
A controversial facial recognition database, used by police departments across the nation, was built in part with 30 billion photos the company scraped from Facebook and other social media users without their permission, the company's CEO recently admitted, creating what critics called a "perpetual police line-up," even for people who haven't done anything wrong.
Posting to social media was supposed to be harmless.
The Verge
In design, both in the digital and physical worlds, color should never be the sole indicator of meaning. A simple test: if your work was converted to grayscale, would it still be usable?
Andy Baio talks about being colorblind and encourages empathy in the design process.
The Verge
“I trust users are doing what they want to do,” he said, noting friction frustrates people trying to grab data or read an article. He wants those users to return — and tell their friends. He views UX as “growing a relationship,” providing something of value rather than squeezing the most out of a single session.
That's it, I'm pressing the independent thought alarm.
ProPublica
For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show.
Corrupt court. The luxury lifestyle must make it easier to hurt people.
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