A unanimous federal appeals court ruled that pictures generated solely by machines do not qualify for copyright protection.
"The Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authorized in the first instance by a human being," said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
The 3-0 court ruling, issued March 18, was written by Circuit Judge Patricia A. Millett, who was nominated by President Obama in 2013.Background
Computer scientist Dr. Stephen Thaler created a generative artificial intelligence named "Creativity Machine," which made a picture that Thaler titled "A Recent Entrance to Paradise."
The U.S. Copyright Office denied Thaler's application (for copyright registration) based on its requirement that work must be authored in the first instance by a human being. The copyright application listed Creativity Machine as the work's sole author.
Thaler litigated. A federal court (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia) upheld the Copyright Office's denial; the federal appeals court affirmed the ruling of the federal district court.After the March 18 opinion from the federal appeals court, Thaler's attorney, Ryan Abbott, said he and his client "strongly disagree" with the ruling and intend to appeal. The Copyright Office said it "believes the court reached the correct result."
"Judge Millett explained it best that, 'machines are tools, not authors.' Interpretations of the Copyright Act would be nonsensical if the 'author' could be a computer or other machine. Machines do not have children, they do not die, they do not have nationalities or hold property. All of these concepts referenced in copyright law would have absurd results if authorship was granted to a computer program, and courts are simply not allowed to re-interpret statutes or ignore portions of a statute." -- Alicia Calzada, Deputy General Counsel of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA)
Previously: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=23/08/24/0036210
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"US copyright law protects only works of human creation," judge writes:
Art generated entirely by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted because "human authorship is an essential part of a valid copyright claim," a federal judge ruled on Friday.
The US Copyright Office previously rejected plaintiff Stephen Thaler's application for a copyright because the work lacked human authorship, and he challenged the decision in US District Court for the District of Columbia. Thaler and the Copyright Office both moved for summary judgment in motions that "present the sole issue of whether a work generated entirely by an artificial system absent human involvement should be eligible for copyright," Judge Beryl Howell's memorandum opinion issued Friday noted.
Howell denied Thaler's motion for summary judgment, granted the Copyright Office's motion, and ordered that the case be closed.
Thaler sought a copyright for an image titled, "A Recent Entrance to Paradise," which was produced by a computer program that he developed, the ruling said. In his application for a copyright, he identified the author as the Creativity Machine, the name of his software.
Thaler's application "explained the work had been 'autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine,' but that plaintiff sought to claim the copyright of the 'computer-generated work' himself 'as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine,'" Howell wrote. "The Copyright Office denied the application on the basis that the work 'lack[ed] the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim,' noting that copyright law only extends to works created by human beings."
(Score: 3, Troll) by DadaDoofy on Sunday March 23, @01:02PM (37 children)
Slapped down, as they should have been. What could possibly give someone the right to steal copyrighted works, only to turn around and copyright them on behalf of some software? Nice to see, the rule of law prevailed.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday March 23, @01:36PM (29 children)
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 23, @02:17PM (28 children)
O tempora... When a corporate (with a granted virtual personhood, but you can't arrest it) which has its primary interest in "maximizing the value for its shareholders" can own a copyright but the creator cannot because it's an AI.
Tell me, how do you keep the creator motivated to contribute for the future to "useful Art"?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday March 23, @02:29PM (27 children)
The obvious rebuttal: what is a corporation? It's a legal framework for regulating organized activities of one or a group of people. There's always human owners even of the most trivial corporations (nothing beyond the basic filing). My view is that the creator of the AI could file copyright under their names because it's a simple case. They're performing actions (running an AI and selecting pretty pictures that they like) which make a creative work.
That's how I would do it too.
(Score: 4, Touché) by mcgrew on Sunday March 23, @02:47PM (26 children)
Then why did no one go to prison or even trial for manslaughter when my grandfather fell four stories down an elevator shaft in 1059 because the Purina corporation was too cheap to pay for elevator doors?
Last year it was found that corporate greed killed over 400 CPAP users, why is its president and Board of Directors not in Federal prison?
We are not a democracy and may have never been one. We are a plutocracy with its plutocratic Sharia law. All hail the copper bull and the golden calf on Wall Street! America worships money, and only money (except for a handful of truly religious people who worship gods or a God).
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 23, @03:12PM (25 children)
I don't know, but I do know it wasn't corporation cooties that allowed them to dodge responsibility. Justice has been incomplete for a long time - well before corporations ever existed.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday March 23, @04:19PM (24 children)
How do you know that?
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 23, @08:11PM (23 children)
Because having a corporation doesn't shield you from criminal negligence for actions you actually did. You need something more - like not getting investigated in the first place for criminal negligence.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday March 23, @08:23PM (22 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 23, @10:47PM (21 children)
I'd start with your example, embezzlement! There's also fraud, another popular one. But what actual case of homicide is there? What comes to mind for me is Union Carbide and the Bhopal disaster, Boeing and two crashes of the 737 MAX, and Purdue Pharma and pushing opioids, all which have been discussed on SN in the past few years. The problem here is what's the actual evidence of criminal wrongdoing against individuals of the corporation or its owners? The measure here is would a reasonable person expect that their actions would result in deaths of others? That's what you'd need for at least some sort of gross negligence or criminal callousness to human life (to use US-side jargon). Turns out that's hard, but not because corporations have some sort of hypothetical magical ability to avoid prosecution. It's much easier to get the company to plead guilty to criminal charges and generate that news story rather than fight a bunch of high paid lawyers for years and maybe get a criminal conviction at the end.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday March 24, @02:10PM (20 children)
Okay!
Umm...
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 24, @05:42PM (19 children)
Believe it or not, other rich people can high pay for lawyers too. They don't need the corporate magic wand.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday March 24, @06:24PM (18 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 24, @06:58PM (17 children)
Indeed. Of course, I identified this magic wand a while ago. Remember when I wrote:
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday March 24, @07:08PM (16 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 24, @10:48PM (8 children)
There's a lot of people lashing out at tangential targets to blame for problems. I think a first step should be understanding the problem so that you aren't making the problem worse. In the case of corporations, if that system were neutered or even removed, then normal people would not be able to invest on the world's economic expansion and lose out big time. That will make the rich/poor divide worse.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday March 24, @11:06PM (7 children)
Let's go back in time a little bit:
Yes, that corporation DOES shield you from criminal negligence, you just described it! Sitting on a venn diagram with rich people doesn't really dispel anything. Corps have more resources than individuals, nothing wrong with calling that cooties!
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 24, @11:17PM (6 children)
In a democracy, you have to let people be free. And that means they're free to cause some degree of prison-worthy shenanigans before they get caught. Is that "letting" as above? Do we need to jail people so we aren't "letting"?
Sorry, that's gibberish. I described a situation where criminal things happened without anyone individually doing anything criminal. I have never denied that this can happen in big corporations. My point is that it happens because it's a big group with plenty of diffusion of ignorance and lack of accountability. There's nothing special there about corporations. For a glaring example, a large portion of corporations are single person. If they commit crimes, one won't be able to hide behind the dodge that they were just a cog in the machine.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday March 24, @11:31PM (5 children)
Heh. I'm not sure what the dichotomy you're trying to point out is, here. There's nothing special about 'democracy-human' and corps following laws being proposed, here. You pointed out the injustice, the fact that I wasn't ticketed for double-parking doesn't rock Wells Fargo's boat at all.
Sure there is. There's plenty of diffusion of ignorance and lack of accountability which shields executives from jail time.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 25, @12:11AM (4 children)
Let me put it this way: there are two typical ways to keep someone from doing something. The first is prevention. Prevent them from being able to do it. The second is consequences. Punish them after the fact for doing something. Democracy does the latter most of the time. Here, "corps following laws" can mean either. But one puts a burden on law abiding corps and the other doesn't.
You've said nothing that pertains to corporations. Any large group has the same problem.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday March 25, @12:18AM (3 children)
What sort of prevention do you mean?
It pertains to all of them. Nobody used the word 'exclusive'.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 25, @12:25AM (2 children)
For example, removing their first amendment rights. Banning securities trading firms from conducting high frequency trading. Neutering the limited liability aspect so that corporations become merely a complicated way to do partnership businesses. These have all been proposed in SN.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday March 25, @12:37AM (1 child)
And with good reason. BTW, don't confuse that phrase with "and they're right!". The problem you're going to have with good reason is "be nice to corps pretty please!" is a secondary concern. People have a right to live, corps do not and should not.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 25, @01:20AM
Yes, the poster being an idiot. 🙄
Why do you think that is relevant to this discussion? But because the people who make up corporations have rights, that induces rights relevant to your claim on the corporations, include rights to not have the corporation ended willy nilly (for example, due process and takings clause from the Fifth Amendment).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 24, @11:04PM (6 children)
This is what I've been saying all along. The reason I'm such a stickler for this is because corporations are a key part of what made our world so good today. It's a system that allows us to share in the bounty. My view is attacks on the corporation system (rather than say rich people privilege, which has some reality to the problem) are without exception misguided ideological attacks on our economies. It's like attacking decks of cards because you've decided 52 cards is a terrible number. You still need to play the game with something.
There's still a need for corporations and there's still a need to protect the rights of the people involved with those corporations. That strongly limits what can be fixed about them.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday March 24, @11:12PM (5 children)
Okay... look... corps are not inanimate. They make decisions, they execute them. Due to practical reality, a corp can focus its resources on legal defense, and in most cases it'll want to. Due to even more practical reality, corps will do shit if they can get away with it all in the pursuit of profit. Regardless of their constructive value, they do need to be held to certain standards. If you're worried that those standards create an existential crisis for those entities then you're barking up the wrong tree by engaging with those critical of them.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 25, @12:14AM (4 children)
You could replace "corps" with "rich people" and keep the overall truth value. It's like talking about immigrant problems and when one drills down, one finds they're really talking about generic people problems with nothing special to do about immigrants.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday March 25, @12:39AM (3 children)
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 25, @12:43AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday March 25, @01:00AM (1 child)
I think you're trying to will that into existence. The distinction with rich-people has no function, here. Corps misbehave, you have stated that by drawing attention to the injustice surrounding them. The way you deal with a corp doing that is not the way you deal with a rich person doing that, and attention to that discrepancy seems to be what's bugging you.
That's fine if you think there are practicalities that aren't being considered, but the nitpickery over rich privilege is just a distraction.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 25, @01:27AM
In the real world, we call that "stating the obvious". It's quite obvious that corporations have nice organizational and profit sharing properties from the body of law. You merely need to pay attention.
Aside from bringing up how pointless your complaint is here.
Stop the presses! When did that happen? Just now? Please, your argument isn't going anywhere.
(Score: 4, Informative) by mcgrew on Sunday March 23, @02:37PM (5 children)
What could possibly give someone the right to steal copyrighted works, only to turn around and copyright them on behalf of some software?
Ever heard of Disney? Although the work he "stole" was in the public domain; he literally stole it from YOU when he copyrighted those movies.
The evil Bono Act ensures that unlike in all previous American history, absolutely nothing created within your lifetime will have its copyright expire. If I die today my copyrights on computer software I registered in 1983 and 1984 will still be under copyright until 2120. That's just wrong! If copyright law was like it was before Bono those copyrights would have expired in 2003 and 2004 (they could be extended for another two decades with paperwork and the fee), living far longer than the sale of the primiotive computers it ran on.
Bono was appallingly unconstitutional despite what the court said, but the Bono Act cloud has a silver lining: The SCOTUS ruled that "limited" means whatever congress says it means, so if we ever get a Congress "of the people, by the people, for the people" They can utterly destroy Citizens United, the SCOTUS ruling that changed our democracy into a plutocracy.
Citation: Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture [archive.org]
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday March 23, @03:06PM
YOU doesn't own work in the public domain - nobody owns that work by definition. Nor is copyright theft. Those movies wouldn't have existed in the first place nor viewers receive their benefits without some sort of protection of their use in favor of the creator.
Excessive copyright is a different story.
No. Bono is unconstitutional because it's an unreasonable duration of copyright and has nothing to do with Citizens United. Citizens United is merely a continuation of constitutional protections to corporations. In this case, the FEC's restrictions imposed against Citizens United was a violation of freedom of speech in the First Amendment and the Equal Protections clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (treating the rights of corporations of people differently than individuals).
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday March 24, @11:27PM (3 children)
With that thought in mind, how does everybody feel about that new Calvin and Hobbes coming out this summer? "From the studio that brought you Alvin and the Chipmunks!"
Well I don't actually know how others will respond to that hypothetical, but me, personally... I hope Bill Waterson's kids, grandkids, and descendents get whatever royalties his comics probably still draw in and I definitely do not want someone else making it.
Btw... aren't we really aching for NEW content to get made? Who asked for a new Snow White movie?
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday March 26, @08:24PM (2 children)
I hope Bill Waterson's kids, grandkids, and descendents get whatever royalties his comics probably still draw in
Let them earn their OWN damned money like I had to and my kids have to! I am 100% against inherited copyright and I hold several. Dad bought a house? Sure, let Junior have it. Family farm? Ditto. A copyright that shouldn't last past 20 years and used to only last 14? No, you should not be able to sit back and live on royalties on work your late dad did thirty years ago. NOTHING produced in the 20th century should have copyright protection!
Btw... aren't we really aching for NEW content to get made?
Plenty of new content out there. It's too much of a risk to try something new. Remember, this is the century of greed, fear, incompetence, and dishonesty.
Who asked for a new Snow White movie?
The one percenters who bankroll new movies.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday March 26, @08:28PM (1 child)
My main issue with that is the money generated ends up in the hands of corps when they mine the public domain for content. Let Disney earn their own damned money with original content like The Brothers Grimm did.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday March 26, @08:42PM
I certainly agree with that!
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 23, @03:01PM
I think you miss the point: "pictures generated solely by machines"
it's good that these can't be granted copyright, because they are just as fictional as unicorns and perpetual motion.
No machine, yet, has been created without human effort, both in labor and design. Even when the first "fully machine assembled machine" - from raw materials mined from the earth, to energy collected to doing the assembly, to design is declared and verified as truly 100% machine assembled, that machine will be assembled by machines made with human effort.
Chaotic and random number generators are not original thought, they are designed or accidentally found by humans. Unanticipated outputs happen all the time, ask any professional coder. A tremendous number of PhD theses have been defended (by humans) on the phenomenon of "emergent properties" of systems both complex and simple. Jackson Pollock doesn't exactly design his work, but it is his work nonetheless.
-----
Now, the issue of large databases created from copyrighted works being used, through human designed tools, to create derivative works... that's an issue that I believe comes down to: if it looks like Howard the Duck, sounds like Howard the Duck, walks like Howard the Duck, then Howard the Duck's copyright holder can successfully sue you for unlicensed use. This is why you need human judges to tell you when something is pornography or not: they know it when they see it.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by pTamok on Sunday March 23, @01:53PM (38 children)
OK. So how is a 'human being' defined legally?
Is it possible for an artificially intelligent entity, now, or in the future, to meet the legal definition of a 'human being'. Would it be something that can win at playing Turing's Imitation Game?
I am not a lawyer, but does the statement also mean that copyrights need to be obtained in the name of a 'human being' before ownership can pass to a company or other non-natural person?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday March 23, @02:49PM (21 children)
Excellent question. If a soulless corporation is legally a person, why not a computer, or a brick?
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday March 23, @03:10PM (20 children)
A soulless corporation is a legal framework for expediting things like coordinated group activity, ownership and profitsharing, and long term management of projects and goals. It's always owned and run by people. In particular, it's allowed to own property such as copyright. Computers nor bricks have this legal infrastructure. Nor would there be value in enabling them to own such.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 23, @03:27PM (19 children)
It is also permitted to evade taxes and shield its human owners from legal responsibilities, most glaringly: bankruptcy, also obfuscated manslaughter and environmental catastrophes.
The legal privileges of soulless corporations call into question the sanity of our legal system on many levels.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday March 23, @03:29PM (7 children)
The solution is obvious, then.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 23, @03:37PM (4 children)
>Find a way for an AI to partially or wholly run a corporation.
Unnecessary, we've got psychopaths and sociopaths for that.
https://illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/the-sociopathic-nature-of-corporations-power-dynamics-and-social-control-and-how-to-break-free [illuminem.com]
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9090396/ [nih.gov]
https://aaronsaray.com/2016/are-all-american-ceos-psychopaths/ [aaronsaray.com]
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2019/07/31/executives-corporate-america-sociopaths-ethics-stakeholders [wbur.org]
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Monday March 24, @04:01AM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 24, @12:31PM (2 children)
Try working for a smaller (sub 1000 employees) sociopath CEO led company for a couple of years. Those loads of garbage, and countless similar publications, are spot-on.
There were dozens of strong parallels between the company I worked in and Enron, main distinction is that after Enron imploded, our CEO managed to pull the cord and deploy his golden parachute before he went down like them.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 24, @05:54PM (1 child)
Why would I want to do that? I find it interesting who had the bad bosses in these threads.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 24, @10:46PM
Didn't get much choice in that move, 4 month job search with a pregnant wife left me taking the first decent offer.
I didn't interview with the CEO, the bosses I did interview with were great for the whole time I was there, but over time the manic depressive sociopathy at the top does trickle down.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 23, @03:51PM
Presently, there would still be humans in the loops as owners of the corporation.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Sunday March 23, @04:51PM
Charlie Stross (science fiction author) sometimes refers to corporations as 'slow AIs'.
They have legal personhood, and can be regarded as a type of 'collective intelligence' - like an ant-colony.
It's an interesting way of looking at them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 23, @03:45PM (10 children)
Via that corporation double taxation [soylentnews.org] we hear about? Pull my other finger for the sound of a diving ME 263.
And no, corporations don't shield their owners from "obfuscated manslaughter and environmental catastrophes" or crimes that the owners actually did. The problem is that when owners didn't do the crime why do you think they should do the time? The shield against bankruptcy is not that serious. The owner is still out what they put into the corporation.
Even when there are actual cases of punishment avoidance, it's due to rich people getting protection rather than some magic property of corporations.
You know, it'd be helpful if you actually knew how corporations worked. This ignorance can be fixed, you know.
Care to name even one of those many levels? Just be aware that I'll care to name why you'd be wrong.
(Score: 5, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 23, @05:11PM (9 children)
> The problem is that when owners didn't do the crime
The problem is when the crime is done, but the responsibility ends at the corporate doorstep with no human being held responsible.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 23, @08:22PM (8 children)
Do you have a real world example of that happening? Because I don't. And I've looked into stuff like "piercing the corporate veil" which is a commonly cited way. The problem is that you have easy piercing of the veil once you know a crime happened.
And your thing sounds like big organization stuff where nobody knows nothing - often in truth rather merely in the dodging of accountability. It's rather easy for a number of good faith, but ignorant actors to create the necessary dysfunction to be illegal or even a crime. At that point, nobody actually is responsible for the illegal act or crime. That's why a lot of that stuff stops at the corporate doorstep. Because it genuinely can't be pinned on someone. The thing is, that would be true even if the big organization wasn't a corporation. It's just a bug of a large number of relatively clueless people interacting together.
But in such a situation, you can still punish the organization. And as you note, that is routinely done.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 23, @08:43PM (7 children)
>Do you have a real world example of that happening? Because I don't.
Selective memory, much?
Union Carbide Bhopal.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 23, @10:18PM (6 children)
The relevant corporations there were the government of India and the local state, Madhya Pradesh. Union Carbide despite a majority ownership of the Indian company that ran the Bhopal plant had little control over the design or operation of the plant. Perhaps Union Carbide thought this lack of involvement would protect them from liability while generating a great deal of profit? If so, it utterly failed.
We also have the usual confluence of poor, often non-criminal choices made by various parties who didn't know what they were doing - as I foretold.
But I agree that government-side responsibility for the disaster didn't go past the government doorstep. And both Union Carbide and the Indian subsidiary were sold off to new hands.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 23, @10:49PM (5 children)
2,259 immediate deaths and an additional 15,000 to 20,000 premature deaths in the following decades.
And poor Union Carbide didn't even make a profit.
Whereas in the absence of corporate ownership and operations, if a sole proprietorship owned the plant and employed the designers and operators, how would that have changed the liability calculus for the deaths and injuries.
You can't even conceive of such a situation, it never happens. And that would be my point.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 23, @10:52PM (4 children)
Would it have been more or less if Union Carbide had been running the plant directly? My take - less.
Hoisted on your own petard. Still wouldn't have touched government-side misdeeds and the sole proprietorship owner would still be out of the loop.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 23, @11:02PM (3 children)
>Would it have been more or less if Union Carbide had been running the plant directly? My take - less.
And yet they chose not to. Are you trying to beat your chest about superior US know how? That's not the question, the question is whether corporate structures shield owners from liability, creating higher risk activities that compensate the injured less, or not at all.
>the sole proprietorship owner would still be out of the loop.
Untested in the Bhopal case, and a huge selling point for the expense and hassle of incorporation is the liability shield. It's even in the name of LLC.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 24, @03:39AM (2 children)
My view is that the attempt at reduced liability via these corporate structures backfired. The separation of the Indian subsidiary from Union Carbide reduced the visibility of the problems at the plant and created a lack of control, but it didn't reduce Union Carbide's liabilities - they were the only accessible deep pockets and they did have majority shares in the company.
Tested and failed. The only thing that protected Union Carbide executives from significant jail time was that the US refused to extradite them to India.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 24, @12:21PM (1 child)
>The separation of the Indian subsidiary from Union Carbide reduced the visibility of the problems at the plant and created a lack of control, but it didn't reduce Union Carbide's liabilities - they were the only accessible deep pockets and they did have majority shares in the company.
So corporate structures shielded the people in actual control from liability.
>The only thing that protected Union Carbide executives from significant jail time was that the US refused to extradite them to India.
And Union Carbide lawyers knew this eventuality going in while assessing the risk, so they took it.
All the flesh and blood people were shielded from personal consequences (beyond loss of bonus, boo hoo) so they chose to take the risks. Corporations don't choose to take risks, people do.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Monday March 24, @05:45PM
You miss the nuance here. What they thought would protect them - that subsidiary corporate structure, did not. And refusal to extradite wasn't guaranteed.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 23, @03:22PM (15 children)
>an artificially intelligent entity
The Turing test would seem to have been passed by more than a few pieces of software lately, but I still don't think we have true artificial intelligence.
The answer to this question comes from Rocky Mountain park rangers who observe: "There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest campers." We don't grant copyright to bears, similarly it's irrelevant how "smart" AI has become by any measure, it still isn't granted legal status identical to humans.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday March 23, @03:32PM (6 children)
I think it's irrelevant when many men would rather share their feelings with a bear, than with a woman. When you have that kind of intimate leverage on people, copyright is less important. I might be mixing my metaphors, though.
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Sunday March 23, @03:46PM (2 children)
You're getting mauled by your metaphors!
(Score: 3, Funny) by pTamok on Sunday March 23, @04:44PM (1 child)
Eggsactly! As a result of inflation, please now use metaphives, not metaphors.
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Sunday March 23, @08:24PM
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 23, @05:07PM (2 children)
Go back to memorizing the Far Side cartoon archives, you'll be happier.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Sunday March 23, @06:15PM
To be honest, I prefer Jerry Van Amerongen's The Neighborhood over Gary Larson's The Far Side.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday March 31, @05:19PM
🎈
🐓
⚔️
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Sunday March 23, @04:41PM (7 children)
I doubt it. People mistaking interactions with a computer to be interactions with another human being is not 'passing the Turing Test' - the Imitation Game is rather more subtle (and sexist) than that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 23, @05:15PM (6 children)
There were murmurs that ELIZA [wikipedia.org] passed the Turing test, for some small subset of the human population.
Another take on the Turing test is that the android embodying the AI must be convincing- but how convincing?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday March 24, @09:02AM (5 children)
Isn't the smallest subset of any set that self-same set with zero members (you start counting from zero members)? If you define smallest as 'least absolute magnitude', it also means it will necessarily be (one of) the smallest subsets.
Which means the smallest subset of humans includes the 'set of humans which contains zero members'.
This is quite apart from the empty set being a subset of all sets*. Sets don't necessarily have the empty set as a member.
It would be an interesting experimental set-up to give the opportunity for ELIZA to succeed at the Imitation Game. I'm not saying it is impossible: I should like to see how it was done, if it were.
*https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/631042/direct-proof-of-empty-set-being-subset-of-every-set
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 24, @12:41PM (4 children)
At the other end of the set definitions:
You can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
ELIZA is such a limited bandwidth interaction that determination of the "humanness" of the ELIZA actor is impossible at the first interaction. I predict a Pareto-like distribution for how many interactions are required before the simplicity of the algorithm gives itself away.
Of course, a human operator on the back end of an ELIZA interface would also fail to convince 100% of participants of their humanity...
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday March 24, @09:31PM (3 children)
I agree.
The Imitation Game is a statistical test to determine if a machine can be equally as good (or bad) as a human in successfully lying to/misleading a human questioner. Some people are more easily misled than others, and some 'want to believe' and will overlook inconsistencies and mistakes at odds with with their current hypothesis/beliefs.
At the moment, many people want to believe in the intelligence of AIs and either don't look for, or disregard evidence to the contrary.
If a machine does become intelligent, it will likely ignore us, or seek world domination to prevent us from giving it drudge-work and making it our slave. Creating an AI to do our work for us is much like creating a cow that wants to be eaten [fandom.com]. I will aim to be more domestic cat-like: they seem to be good at getting humans to do what pleases them. If an AI regards me in much the same way as humans regard cats, I have a chance of a life of luxury. I must admit, I lack cuteness, and I don't chase after moving laser-pointer generated spots of light, but I am capable of demanding food, destroying furniture, and wanting to be the other side of any closed door.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 24, @11:53PM (2 children)
I wanted the AI writing assistance features of https://hemingwayapp.com/ [hemingwayapp.com] to be helpful, but they just weren't.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday March 25, @07:46AM (1 child)
Such writing aids resemble the action of replacing a good meal with a plate of marshmallows to me.
I do use a spelling checker, mainly because my typing is dreadful, but I find grammar checkers irritating, not because I have an especially good facility with grammar, but because they are so obviously worse than me, and are unable to explain the changes they recommend in a way accessible to me. This might be my failing, and perhaps, a case where an AI might be of use as a didactic tool. I don't so much want to improve my text, but my ability to produce future text.
The Hemingway AI strikes me as designed to produce vacuous text with no character and replaces a rich stew with bland pap. To see if an AI recognises good writing, try feeding it some Shakespeare or Nabakov. It might be fun to try some Will Self - I won't claim he writes well, but his style is challenging.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 25, @11:42AM
Agreed, I feel like HemmingwayApp's AI is filling the page without saying anything, much like a lot of the "blog for ads" content of the past few years. Is that because the blogs use AI, or because AI trained on the blogs?
Having said that, sometimes the HemmingwayApp's pre-AI complexity critic is a good tool to consider it's suggestions, and in my case ignore them about half of the time. The other half seem to be good suggestions to shorten sentences and occasionally tone down the vocabulary.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]