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reasonsforhope · 3 days

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AI models can seemingly do it all: generate songs, photos, stories, and pictures of what your dog would look like as a medieval monarch.

But all of that data and imagery is pulled from real humans — writers, artists, illustrators, photographers, and more — who have had their work compressed and funneled into the training minds of AI without compensation.

Kelly McKernan is one of those artists. In 2023, they discovered that Midjourney, an AI image generation tool, had used their unique artistic style to create over twelve thousand images.

“It was starting to look pretty accurate, a little infringe-y,” they told The New Yorker last year. “I can see my hand in this stuff, see how my work was analyzed and mixed up with some others’ to produce these images.”

For years, leading AI companies like Midjourney and OpenAI, have enjoyed seemingly unfettered regulation, but a landmark court case could change that.

On May 9, a California federal judge allowed ten artists to move forward with their allegations against Stability AI, Runway, DeviantArt, and Midjourney. This includes proceeding with discovery, which means the AI companies will be asked to turn over internal documents for review and allow witness examination.

Lawyer-turned-content-creator Nate Hake took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to celebrate the milestone, saying that “discovery could help open the floodgates.”

“This is absolutely huge because so far the legal playbook by the GenAI companies has been to hide what their models were trained on,” Hake explained...

“I’m so grateful for these women and our lawyers,” McKernan posted on X, above a picture of them embracing Ortiz and Andersen. “We’re making history together as the largest copyright lawsuit in history moves forward.” ...

The case is one of many AI copyright theft cases brought forward in the last year, but no other case has gotten this far into litigation.

“I think having us artist plaintiffs visible in court was important,” McKernan wrote. “We’re the human creators fighting a Goliath of exploitative tech.”

“There are REAL people suffering the consequences of unethically built generative AI. We demand accountability, artist protections, and regulation.”

-via GoodGoodGood, May 10, 2024

#ai #anti ai #fuck ai art #ai art #big tech #tech news #lawsuit #united states #us politics #good news #hope #copyright #copyright law

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read-marx-and-lenin · 3 days

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#us politics #biden #leftism #liberalism #socialism #communism #politics #election 2024 #2024 election #democrats #anti capitalism

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politijohn · 1 day

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Simply nonsense, Joe

#politics #us politics #government #Joe Biden #the left #progressive #current events #news #Israel #free Palestine #palestine

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hamadisthings · 1 day

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news flash

it's believed by FFTF that KOSA may get a vote + house markup as early as next week PROOF: Axios, Blumenthal, Bloomberg

find you senators here

stopkosa call tool here

fax tool here

call scripts here

DO NOT PANIC BTW STAY CALM IF WE PANIC WE CAN GET UNORGANIZED WHICH COULD CAUSE THIS BILL TO SLIP

#bad internet bills #stop kosa #fuck kosa #lgbtq #kosa bill #kids online safety bill #us politics #politics #kosa #kill kosa #anti kosa

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eziojensenthe3rd · 1 day

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KOSA aka the Kids Online Safety Act could be voted as early as this week! Start getting to work on raising the word or if you are in the usa, get to calling your reps right the fuck now!

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txtstotheworld · 1 day

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Hello all.

I have some updates concerning California's AB3080 as well as KOSA.

Starting with AB3080, it has passed assembly and is heading to senate.

With KOSA, there is the potential for a vote to be this week.

I would also like to apologize for the late postings. I am very busy at the moment and have not had time to report on anything.

Resources:

DISCORD

SENATE FINDER

HOUSE FINDER

BAD INTERNET BILLS

CALL SCRIPTS:

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animentality · 3 days

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#american dad #israel #us politics #palestine

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comeonamericawakeup · 15 hours

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🙄🙄🙄

#vote blue #us politics

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 2 days

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New details have emerged of plans by Trump allies to dismantle democracy under a second Trump administration by packing the Department of Justice with Trump loyalists and shrinking the independent scope of the FBI. The plans, as detailed by Reuters, seek to craft a DOJ to advance conservative agendas, heavily curtail civil liberties, and impede investigations into corruption by Trump and his allies.

The plans laid out by Trump allies to convert the FBI into a politically charged conservative attack dog come from the authoritarian aspirations of Project 2025, a sprawling network led by conservative think tanks that comb through existing law to find loopholes and precedent for Trump—or any conservative president—to enact extreme right-wing policies and consolidate power at a moment’s notice.

Trump allies plan to nuke consent decrees, a sort of contractual oversight agreement between the Department of Justice and local police departments, to curb civil rights abuses. They also want to downgrade the FBI’s access to the attorney general, instead making the FBI head report to two politically installed assistant attorneys general.

Steve Bradbury, who served as transportation secretary under Trump and who spoke with Reuters about these plans, claimed in backward fashion that the DOJ acting independently from the president’s wishes poses a “recipe for abuse of power.”

“Whenever you have power centers ... that have enormous resources, coercive power and investigative tools at their disposal, and they are presumed to be independent of any control down the chain of command from the president, that is a recipe for abuse of power,” Bradbury told Reuters.

Conservatives have long called to dismantle the FBI following investigations into Russian collusion with Trump’s 2016 campaign and indictments by the DOJ of participants in the January 6 Capitol riot. Trump allies want to reduce the scope of the FBI’s investigative authority, leaving the department to focus solely on “large-scale crimes and threats to national security,” from which insurrection and sedition by conservatives are, naturally, excluded. A January report by the National Institute of Justice found far-right extremism has continued to outpace all other forms of domestic terrorism since 1990.

Plans to dramatically alter the DOJ to act as an extension of conservative ambitions rather than an independent agency follow a similar pattern to Trump’s overhaul of the Supreme Court and packing conservative judges throughout the federal circuit as president—changes that led to the overturning of Roe after Trump left office and a continuation of attacks on LGBTQ+ freedoms and civil rights today. If reelected, Trump’s allies would replicate that process at the Department of Justice.

#us politics #news #republicans #donald trump #conservatives #gop #trump administration #project 2025 #fbi #department of justice #authoritarianism #fascisim #reuters #the new republic #2024 #Steve Bradbury #National Institute of Justice #civil liberties #corruption

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reasonsforhope · 14 hours

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Double dose of articles about how crime is actually plummeting

From the UK:

"Seventy-eight per cent of people in England and Wales think that crime has gone up in the last few years, according to the latest survey. But the data on actual crime shows the exact opposite.

As of 2024, violence, burglary and car crime have been declining for 30 years and by close to 90%, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) – our best indicator of true crime levels. Unlike police data, the CSEW is not subject to variations in reporting and recording.

The drop in violence includes domestic violence and other violence against women. Anti-social behaviour has similarly declined. While increased fraud and computer misuse now make up half of crime, this mainly reflects how far the rates of other crimes have fallen.

All high-income countries have experienced similar trends, and there is scientific consensus that the decline in crime is a real phenomenon.

The perception gap

So why is there such a gulf between public perception and the reality of crime trends? A regular YouGov poll asks respondents for their top three concerns from a broad set of issues. Concern about crime went from a low in 2016 (when people were more concerned with Brexit), quadrupled by 2019 and plummeted during the pandemic when people had other worries. But in the last year, the public’s concern about crime has risen again.

There are many possible explanations for this, of which the first is poor information. A study published in 1998 found that “people who watch a lot of television or who read a lot of newspapers will be exposed to a steady diet of crime stories” that does not reflect official statistics.

The old news media adage “if it bleeds, it leads” reflects how violent news stories, including crime increases and serious crimes, capture public attention. Knife crime grabs headlines in the UK, but our shock at individual incidents is testament to their rarity and our relative success in controlling violence – many gun crimes do not make the news in the US.

Most recent terrorist attacks in the UK have featured knives (plus a thwarted Liverpool bomber), but there is little discussion of how this indicates that measures to restrict guns and bomb-making resources are effective."

-via The Conversation, May 13, 2024

And the United States:

"[The United States experienced a spike in crime rates in 2020, during the pandemic.] But in 2023, crime in America looked very different.

"At some point in 2022 — at the end of 2022 or through 2023 — there was just a tipping point where violence started to fall and it just continued to fall," said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics.

In cities big and small, from both coasts, violence has dropped.

"The national picture shows that murder is falling. We have data from over 200 cities showing a 12.2% decline ... in 2023 relative to 2022," Asher said, citing his own analysis of public data. He found instances of rape, robbery and aggravated assault were all down too.

Yet when you ask people about crime in the country, the perception is it's getting a lot worse.

A Gallup poll released in November found 77% of Americans believed there was more crime in the country than the year before. And 63% felt there was either a "very" or "extremely" serious crime problem — the highest in the poll's history going back to 2000.

So what's going on?

What the cities are seeing

What you see depends a lot on what you're looking at, according to Asher.

"There's never been a news story that said, 'There were no robberies yesterday, nobody really shoplifted at Walgreens,'" he said.

"Especially with murder, there's no doubt that it is falling at [a] really fast pace right now. And the only way that I find to discuss it with people is to talk about what the data says." ...

For cities like San Francisco, Baltimore and Minneapolis, there may be different factors at play [in crime declining]. And in some instances, it comes as the number of police officers declines too.

Baltimore police are chronically short of their recruitment goal, and as of last September had more than 750 vacant positions, according to a state audit report...

In Minneapolis, police staffing has plummeted. According to the Star Tribune, there are about 560 active officers — down from nearly 900 in 2019. Mannix said the 2020 police killing of George Floyd resulted in an unprecedented exodus from the department...

In Minneapolis, the city is putting more financial resources into nontraditional policing initiatives. The Department of Neighborhood Safety, which addresses violence through a public health lens, received $22 million in the 2024 budget."

-via NPR, February 12, 2024

#crime #violate crime #united kingdom #england #wales #united states #us politics #baltimore #san francisco #police #defund the police #good news #hope

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sher-ee · 2 days

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politijohn · 2 days

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Billionaires Should Not Exist

#eat the rich #capitalism #data #politics #us politics #government #the left #progressive #current events #news #wealth inequality #income inequality #socioeconomic inequality #end capitalism

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mypatchworkreflection · 3 days

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"Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant to the chief of staff in the Department of the Interior, became the first Jewish political appointee to resign her post in protest of U.S. President Joe Biden's support for Israel's genocide in Gaza."

"Call announced her resignation on Wednesday, which is also the 76th anniversary of the Nakba—or the expulsion of the majority of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 as part of the process of creating the current state of Israel.

"Nakba and Shoah, the Hebrew word for Holocaust, mean the same thing: catastrophe," Call wrote in her letter. "I reject the premise that one people's salvation must come at another's destruction. I am committed to creating a world where this does not happen—and this cannot be done from within the Biden administration.""

#free palestine #current events #us politics #lily greenberg call

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spoonienation · 2 days

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This is akin to attempted murder, with special circumstances -- it's a hate crime (targeted a protected group of people, the disabled community).

This is genocide.

#spoonie #us politics #covid #healthcare in the united states #disability #murder #genocide

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thowawayuntilfurthernotice · 3 days

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Gee, it’s almost like they’re been using Hamas as a scapegoat to continue funding a genocide.

Also, you gotta love how “Telling the Israeli government not to do a genocide” isn’t an option.

#Palestine #Free Palestine #Gaza #Rafah #US Politics #Current Events

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meandmybigmouth · 3 days

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HERE IS THE LIST OF THE THINGS BIDEN IS DESTROYING AMERICA WITH!. YOU KNOW! THE THINGS THAT RED STATE REPUBLICANS TAKE CREDIT FOR!

#republicans #donald trump #maga #us politics

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