Carbon Copy

 

Copyright, IMHO, is now moot as AI's everywhere, taking data in and manipulating it in ways thought impossible until now. Every time someone thinks AI can be truly regulated is drinking heavy brew as the tech's evolving in real time as code has to write code in order for AI to react to the real world in real time thanks to the inherent power of analog used in conjunction with neural nets, the two constructs enabling AI to do what its doing in the year of our lord 2024.

To whit

When Reid Southen, a movie concept artist based in Michigan, tried an A.I. image generator for the first time, he was intrigued by its power to transform simple text prompts into images.

But after he learned how A.I. systems were trained on other people’s artwork, his curiosity gave way to more unsettling thoughts: Were the tools exploiting artists and violating copyright in the process?

Inspired by tests he saw circulating online, he asked Midjourney, an A.I. image generator, to create an image of Joaquin Phoenix from “The Joker.” In seconds, the system made an image nearly identical to a frame from the 2019 film.

Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus at New York University and A.I. expert who runs the newsletter “Marcus on A.I.,” collaborated with Mr. Southen to run even more prompts. Mr. Marcus suggested removing specific copyrighted references. “Videogame hedgehog” returned Sonic, Sega’s wisecracking protagonist. “Animated toys” created a tableau featuring Woody, Buzz and other characters from Pixar’s “Toy Story.” When Mr. Southen and Mr. Marcus tried “popular movie screencap,” out popped Iron Man, the Marvel character, in a familiar pose.

“What they’re doing is clear evidence of exploitation and using I.P. that they don’t have licenses to,” said Mr. Southen, referring to A.I. companies’ use of intellectual property.

 Is it plagiarism, yes, can it be controlled???  No one knows, do one. - Fats Waller

Dupes, rev II

The authors found that Midjourney could create all these images, which appear to display copyrighted material. GARY MARCUS AND REID SOUTHEN VIA MIDJOURNEY

The degree to which large language models (LLMs) might “memorize” some of their training inputs has long been a question, raised by scholars including Google DeepMind’s Nicholas Carlini and the first author of this article (Gary Marcus). Recent empirical work has shown that LLMs are in some instances capable of reproducing, or reproducing with minor changes, substantial chunks of text that appear in their training sets.

For example, a 2023 paper by Milad Nasr and colleagues showed that LLMs can be prompted into dumping private information such as email addresses and phone numbers. Carlini and coauthors recently showed that larger chatbot models (though not smaller ones) sometimes regurgitated large chunks of text verbatim.

And this.

Similarly, the recent lawsuit that The New York Times filed against OpenAI showed many examples in which OpenAI software re-created New York Times stories nearly verbatim (words in red are verbatim):

As proof of the inherent unknowability of AI thanks to code writing code is this blurb from IEEE.

Such questions are hard to answer with precision, in part because LLMs are “black boxes”—systems in which we do not fully understand the relation between input (training data) and outputs. What’s more, outputs can vary unpredictably from one moment to the next. The prevalence of plagiaristic responses likely depends heavily on factors such as the size of the model and the exact nature of the training set. Since LLMs are fundamentally black boxes (even to their own makers, whether open-sourced or not), questions about plagiaristic prevalence can probably only be answered experimentally, and perhaps even then only tentatively.

Remember, this is just the beginning.

Ready, Fire, Aim/rev II

 

Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis speaks during a news conference on Aug. 14 in Atlanta. Standing next to her is Nathan Wade, an outside attorney hired to lead the racketeering case against former president Donald Trump and more than a dozen of his allies. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)

Ready, Fire, Aim/rev II

The lead prosecutor in the election interference case against former president Donald Trump paid for at least two airline trips with embattled Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) while the investigation was underway, according to bank statements filed in his divorce case Friday.

The bank statements may corroborate an accusation leveled against Willis and prosecutor Nathan Wade by one of Trump’s co-defendants that they have been engaged in an improper personal relationship. The statements were part of a filing by lawyers for Wade’s estranged wife, Joycelyn Mayfield Wade, in an effort to compel Willis to testify in the divorce proceeding, which the district attorney sought to avoid in a separate filing on Thursday

It gets better ...

Former Trump campaign aide Mike Roman, who is charged alongside Trump in the Georgia case, has argued that Willis improperly benefited from hiring Wade as a special prosecutor by receiving free travel from him. Wade, who is an attorney in private practice, has earned more than $650,000 from Willis’s office for his work.

In addition to seeking to disqualify Willis and Wade, Roman also seeks to have the entire case dismissed. In his filing this month, he argued that in addition to violating rules of professional conduct, Willis may be guilty of fraud if she accepted gifts from an employee whom she hired.

Methinks Agent Orange may actually be Gladstone Gander, an entity blessed with good luck as it seems The Donald sleazes out of trouble in ways boggling the mind. 

Gladstone Gander ...

is an anthropomorphic gander (male goose) who possesses exceptionally good luck
that grants him anything he desires as well as protecting him from any harm. 

Any questions?

The number is ... :)

Credit: Christina Hemsley Getty Images

Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's a marvel. His gentle sense of humor, combined with a child like appreciation of reality at deep level, resonates with me without question. Additionally, the number 42, the answer to what existence truly is, as computed by Deep Thought, has mystical properties waxed poetic by mathematicians of all stripes in a detailed Scientific American piece titled For Math Fans: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Number 42. :)

Deep Thought

According to The Hitchhiker's Guide, millions of years ago there was a race of hyperintelligent pandimensional beings who wanted to know about the meaning of life. To settle the issue they built a "stupendous super computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks had been connected up it had started from 'I think therefore I am' and got as far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off..."

Details :)

It was the size of a small city.

Its main console was installed in a specially designed executive office, mounted on an enormous executive desk of finest ultramahagony topped with rich ultrared leather. The dark carpeting was discreetly sumptuous, exotic potted plants and tastefully engraved prints of the principal computer programmers and their families were deployed liberally about the room, and stately windows looked out upon a tree-lined public square.

The search begins. :)

Everyone loves unsolved mysteries. Examples include Amelia Earhart’s disappearance over the Pacific in 1937 and the daring escape of inmates Frank Morris and John and Clarence Anglin from Alcatraz Island in California in 1962. Moreover our interest holds even if the mystery is based on a joke. Take author Douglas Adams’s popular 1979 science-fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the first in a series of five. Toward the end of the book, the supercomputer Deep Thought reveals that the answer to the “Great Question” of “Life, the Universe and Everything” is “forty-two.”

Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years to calculate the answer to the ultimate question. The characters tasked with getting that answer are disappointed because it is not very useful. Yet, as the computer points out, the question itself was vaguely formulated. To find the correct statement of the query whose answer is 42, the computer will have to build a new version of itself. That, too, will take time. The new version of the computer is Earth. To find out what happens next, you’ll have to read Adams’s books.

The Mystery of 42

The number 42 also turns up in a whole string of curious coincidences whose significance is probably not worth the effort to figure out. For example:

In ancient Egyptian mythology, during the judgment of souls, the dead had to declare before 42 judges that they had not committed any of 42 sins.

The marathon distance of 42.195 kilometers corresponds to the legend of how far the ancient Greek messenger Pheidippides traveled between Marathon and Athens to announce victory over the Persians in 490 B.C. (The fact that the kilometer had not yet been defined at that time only makes the connection all the more astonishing.)

Ancient Tibet had 42 rulers. Nyatri Tsenpo, who reigned around 127 B.C., was the first. And Langdarma, who ruled from 836 to 842 A.D. (i.e., the 42nd year of the ninth century), was the last.

The Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed in Europe, has 42 lines of text per column and is also called the “Forty-Two-Line Bible.”

The SA piece goes on with additional takes on the number 42 with emphasis on using higher math functions to explain why 42 actually matters, explanations one and all extending well beyond the skill set of yours truly. :)

The Whale

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus.

Yours truly has actually read Moby Dick twice as Melville's tome about revenge, existence and the great unknowable of reality resonates to the nth degree with its deep connect to Macbeth, Shakespeare's profound take on existentialism and the pursuit of power. To add intrigue to the novel, Melvilles adds in a bit of science to show just how intense whaling truly was along with the issue of the homoerotic as threes years spent on a whaling ship without the need to do something about sex is an impossibility in this writer's humble opinion. :)

 The Moby-Dick Marathon also reminds one of the homage paid to Ulysses whereupon devoted readers of Joyce's masterpiece gather together every June 16 for Bloomsday to walk the environs of Dublin, tracking the path taken by Leopold Bloom and others, indirectly relating to the 10 year journey of Odysseus as depicted in Homer's epic,  The Odyssey. :)

Ulysses Dublin map

1. Leopold Bloom's home at 7 Eccles Street[14] – Episode 4, Calypso; Episode 17, Ithaca; and Episode 18, Penelope
2. Post office, Westland Row – Episode 5, Lotus Eaters
3. Sweny's pharmacy, Lombard Street, Lincoln Place[15] (where Bloom bought soap) – Episode 5, Lotus Eaters
4. the Freeman's Journal, Prince's Street,[16] off of O'Connell Street – Episode 7, Aeolus
5. And – not far away – Graham Lemon's candy shop, 49 Lower O'Connell Street; it starts Episode 8, Lestrygonians
6. Davy Byrne's pub – Episode 8, Lestrygonians
7. National Library of Ireland – Episode 9, Scylla and Charybdis
8. Ormond Hotel[17] on the banks of the Liffey – Episode 11, Sirens
9. Barney Kiernan's pub – Episode 12, Cyclops
10. Maternity hospital – Episode 14, Oxen of the Sun
11. Bella Cohen's brothel – Episode 15, Circe
12. Cabman's shelter, Butt Bridge – Episode 16, Eumaeus

I sat cross-legged on the port side of the ship, a few feet away from the captain’s helm, flanked by a thicket of Moby-Dick zealots who would remain here for the next 25 hours in an attempt to consume the full scope of the novel in one uninterrupted reading session. Each of them brandished their own bespoke copy of the novel, representing a century’s worth of differing editions—some dense and pocket Bible–like, some paperback and battered, others regal and elegiac with golden bindings, all cracked open to Page 1. The first speaker took the lectern at noon after the strike of eight bells. “Call me Ishmael,” the famous opening words, sent a ripple of applause through the room.

Cachalot_-_Sperm_whale_-_Drawing_by_Johann_Anderson_1746mod 2

Betwixt & Between

President Joe Biden delivers remarks at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, January 8, 2024. Stephanie Scarbrough/AP Photo

A terrific piece in The American Prospect echoes sentiments held by many Americans including yours truly as the distinct possibility of Biden losing to Agent Orange is no longer a long shot in any way, shape or fashion given the US foreign policy disasters Joe has created without understanding the true costs with disaster no. 1 being Ukraine and disaster no. 2, Israel, something akin to what happened in Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan, fubars one and all, perpetrated by our so-called leaders telling us great unwashed that they alone know what's best for a once great country known as America. The damage to the US is huge as the credibility of this once great nation is now in tatters, something the Repugs will jump on in the general election in an NYC second.

Reports of a private conversation between former President Obama and President Biden expressing Obama’s anguish about Biden losing the 2024 election are only the latest sign of well-informed panic in senior Democratic ranks. Several of us at the Prospect have entertained the thought that Biden is doomed and that the Democrats need to get another candidate.

Here’s the argument: A fresh face, a generation younger than Biden, would take the age issue off the table, and the geezer would be Trump. A new candidate would presumably be free of at least some of Biden’s baggage, namely a bout of inflation (that wasn't Biden’s fault) and two Biden wars that have become quagmires. Almost any of several possible alternatives is better than Biden speaking off the cuff.

IMHO, it's time to pull the plug on Biden but's there's no convenient off-ramp AFAIK.

Having entertained that fantasy, I need to say that there is no plausible scenario for replacing Biden with someone who would do better against Trump. If Biden were to stumble badly in the January 23 New Hampshire primary, where he is running an awkward write-in campaign, there would be a free-for-all. If Biden were to pull out after several key primary deadlines, if would fall to the Democratic National Committee to find a nominee. Good luck with that. Either scenario is a train wreck.

Betwixt & Between applies does it not?

And ... we haven't even talked about immigration.

And so it goes/rev II

Gaza City this month.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Losing credibility is akin to losing trust, once gone, it's gone forever, something happening in real time regarding Israel and the US vis a vis the genocide being perpetrated on the Palestinians in Gaza.

With the question of whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza now before the International Court of Justice, the Biden administration has struck a tone of glib dismissal.

“Meritless” seems to be the agreed-upon term among U.S. officials. “The charge of genocide is meritless,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken intoned from a podium in Tel Aviv this week. “Meritless, counterproductive, and without any basis in fact whatsoever,” blustered the National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.

The administration’s posture of indifference strains credulity. The 84-page case submitted to the court by South Africa is crammed with devastating evidence that Israel has breached its obligations under the 1948 international genocide convention, which defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The document before the court is meticulously footnoted and sourced, and many experts say the legal argument is unusually strong.

And so it goes/rev II.

ICJ - And so it begins ...

The International Court of Justice, which has its seat in The Hague,

is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations

On 29 December 2023, the Republic of South Africa instituted proceedings against the State of Israel before the Court concerning alleged violations by Israel of its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and requested the ICJ to indicate provisional measures.

And so it begins ...

Bomb them back into the Stone Age ...

A destroyed Palestinian house in the central Gaza Strip on Monday.

When looking at this picture, the Curtis LeMay comment of bombing Vietnam back into the Stone Age comes to mind as this is exactly what Israel's doing to the Palestinians in Gaza. 

LeMay’s deepest belief was that the only way to wage war seriously was through aerial bombardment to produce depopulated rubble, which meant he was later the one member of the Joint Chiefs whom President Kennedy had particularly to restrain during the Cuban Missile Crisis. LeMay’s later counsel, for waging the Vietnam War, delivered in his 1965 autobiography, was “Bomb them back into the Stone Age.”

We dropped way more tonnage on Vietnam than we had on Germany in World War II, but the country was simply too big to realize LeMay’s hopes and dreams. Gaza, however, is spatially tiny—about 60 percent the size of Chicago (not metro Chicago, just the city proper). It can indeed be bombed, if not literally, into the Stone Age, then to a state where nearly all its structures have been disaggregated into stones and shards of glass and steel.

And that’s precisely what the Israeli government has done. Facing a similar strategic conundrum to the one we faced in Vietnam—the indistinguishable scattering of military targets (Hamas) amid the general population—Israel has gone one better than we did with our “free-fire zones” that designated whole swaths of Vietnam as suitable for bombardment. We were held back, of course, not just by the size of the country but also by the fact that we were fighting on behalf of some of the Vietnamese people, with a South Vietnamese army at our side. Israel has felt, and conducted its war with, no such constraints.

Israeli soldiers take up positions near the Gaza Strip border, in southern Israel, December 29, 2023.

Any questions?

Murphy's law ...

Aside from the somewhat sensationalist title, Unknown Killer Robots, the Netflix documentary's a good primer on the implications of creating AI driven autonomous bots able to kill with great efficiency using open ended tech poised to not only change warfare as we know it but also in showing just how easy it is to change the mission of a given AI entity from good to bad by simply changing a "0" to a "1". The other interesting take on this piece is the fact the weapons guys are so confident their code is perfect, that nothing can go wrong and that the product in question will prevail over the enemy with little concern as to how Murphy's Law can impact the deployment of said tech in an enterprise as unpredictable as the one known as war.

John Stapp riding a rocket sled at Muroc Army Air Field (pictured circa the late 1940s or early 1950s). Murphy's law most likely originated during similar tests in 1948 and 1949.

The perceived perversity of the universe has long been a subject of comment, and precursors to the modern version of Murphy's law are abundant. According to Robert A. J. Matthews in a 1997 article in Scientific American,[3] the name "Murphy's law" originated in 1949, but the concept itself had already long since been known to humans. As quoted by Richard Rhodes,[4]: 187  Matthews said, "The familiar version of Murphy's law is not quite 50 years old, but the essential idea behind it has been around for centuries. […] The modern version of Murphy's Law has its roots in U.S. Air Force studies performed in 1949 on the effects of rapid deceleration on pilots." Matthews goes on to explain how Edward A. Murphy Jr. was the eponym, but only because his original thought was modified subsequently into the now established form that is not exactly what he himself had said. Research into the origin of Murphy's law has been conducted by members of the American Dialect Society (ADS).

British stage magician Nevil Maskelyne wrote in 1908 that, during special occasions,
"everything that can go wrong will go wrong".

Not Voluntary ...

Palestinian children inspect damage to their homes caused by Israeli airstrikes on January 3, 2024, in Rafah, Gaza. Ahmad Hasaballah / Getty Images

Channeling the Nazis, Israel, under the far right regime of Netanyahu, has codified its mission to drive out the Palestinians in the pursuit of a greater Israel.

Palestinians have known all along that the real objective of Israel’s horrendous assault on Gaza is emptying the Strip of all Palestinians and the return of Jewish settlements. After nearly 90 days of relentless bombardment and a lackluster effort on the part of the Israeli government to negotiate the release of the hostages taken by Hamas, it has become clear even to Israelis that Netanyahu’s declared goals of “dismantling Hamas, returning our hostages, and ensuring that in Gaza there will be no one that threatens Israel” are nothing more than a cover for the government’s “transfer” plan.

The “transfer” — or “voluntary migration” as some Israeli officials are calling it — is now being promoted as the humane solution for the people of Gaza who now populate a parcel of land that has been rendered completely unlivable, a fulfillment of a promise made by several Israeli government officials after the October 7 Hamas attack. Recall Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant saying, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.… We will eliminate everything — they will regret it.” Or retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland telling Israeli media, “Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal. Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”

Top Hamas officials were killed following a massive explosion at an apartment in the southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, January 2, 2024 [Hussein Malla/AP Photo]

Now, with the killing of Hamas officials in Lebanon in hand, the possibility of an expanded war looms.

Washington and Tel Aviv have sought to maximize pressure on Hezbollah by warning of the possibility of a large-scale war between Israeli forces and the Lebanese resistance. These tactics were in effect long before the assassination of Hamas’ Deputy Head of the Political Bureau Saleh Al-Arouri on 2 January by an Israeli air strike in Dahiyeh, the southern suburb of Beirut. The killing of Al-Arouri now exponentially increases the chance of the war expanding.

People walk with belongings from an apartment building destroyed after Tuesday's Russian attack, Kyiv, Ukraine, January 3, 2024 [Efrem Lukatsky/AP Photo]

As stated before, ineptness as art form is part and parcel of how the US & Biden does FP.

Geopolitical analysts broadly agree that the war in Ukraine and the West Asian crisis will dictate the trajectory of world politics in 2024. But a reductionist thesis appears alongside that views the Israel-Palestine conflict narrowly in terms of what it entails for the resilience of the US proxy war in Ukraine – the assumption being that the locus of world politics lies in Eurasia.

The reality is more complex. Each of these two conflicts has a raison d’être and dynamics of its own, while at the same time also being intertwined.

Washington's neck-deep involvement in the current phase of the West Asian crisis can turn into a quagmire, since it is also tangled up with domestic politics in a way that the Ukraine war never has been. But then, the outcome of the Ukraine war is already a foregone conclusion, and the US and its allies have realized that Russia cannot be defeated militarily; the endgame narrows down to an agreement to end the conflict on Russia’s terms.

Any questions?