Yep, had a lawyer telling me that image timestamp cannot be faked. While it's literally a right-click away.

The first thing that should be done - which should be easy enough to do, is demonstrating blasphemy with the voices of all the most pious leaders that lead the lynch mobs. If those ones get believed, well, problem is solved in an alternate way.

I also however don’t believe that deepfaked porn is actually harmful. People are already imagining people naked, and it’s been easy to photoshop a nude for 15 years. A talented artist was needed 200 years ago. Allowing this (admittedly rude and disrespectful) act to be done with less skill changes very little.

I'll note that both photoshop and changing the timestamp of images (mentioned below) are only easy for a very small percentage of the population. It'd likely be different if >30% of people could easily do these things.

Skype does it in real time (for live translation) with a few seconds of audio. For the reasons discussed in this thread, it continuously forgets its previous training from the call to not make the voice too similar, but just similar enough to distinguish the speakers.

Almost none, at most as little as a professional impersonator requires. GPT-4o's advanced voice mode would clone the user's voice by accident. A recording clip of one incident is available:

>During testing, we also observed rare instances where the model would unintentionally generate an output emulating the user’s voice.

>Example of unintentional voice generation, model outbursts “No!” then begins continuing the sentence in a similar sounding voice to the red teamer’s voice

https://assets.ctfassets.net/kftzwdyauwt9/4CG0G7y9WOfEkzBpi7...

https://openai.com/index/gpt-4o-system-card/

Just a few seconds of speech gets you pretty far with a lot of models

Yes, you’re right. That’s why the problem is the lynch mobs. If there was no AI, people would find another way to sic the mob on someone. I’m sure it’s already happened countless times without AI. Mobs aren’t known for the rational behavior and respect of the rule of law.

But mob formation and mass social shaming on little evidence already happens without AI and it isn't clear why AI would make it worse. If it gets so easy to create fake videos that'll just muddy the waters and people would trust rumour less, not form mobs more.

It happens once, then some wag creates videos of all the mob leaders blaspheming or whatever. Undermines the idea that the videos are the root cause.

Next or next next generation would be used to it. Digital content would be consumed differently, with automatical scepticism or so...

Remember when people believed that camera took our soul when we are caotured on image?

https://apnews.com/article/ai-maryland-principal-voice-recor...

In the US, freedom of speech means the government won't stifle you, but the court of public opinion will crucify you for saying the wrong thing. In the linked case, a school principal was framed for being a racist, a fire able offense. Better than being killed by religious extremists, I suppose, but still not great. Thankfully in this case they were able to find the perpetrator who faked evidence, but we have a problem.

>radicalized by things they've read on the internet

That take pretty much throws the shooters' preceding years of anguish under the bus to make a political score. "Ban the wrongspeech!" is a seductively easier proposition than ending youth bullying and ostracism.

The internet isn't always the bogeyman, the last assassin was radicalized by mass media.

People don't shoot up crowds because of something they read on the internet. They do it because they are done with life. Everything after that is retrospective reasoning.

Yes, but after the invention of radio and television we already enabled mass indoctrination and mass brainwashing. The internet is more refined but the same principle.

The solution is not to ban technology (it's impossible), but to create a more decentralised society where the majority of voters, which is easily brainwashed, doesn't get to dictate the life of the minority. We need to destroy and dismantle all the gigantic entities that ruin our life for the advantage of the few, whether they are the government or corporations ruled by billionaires controlling the government.

We also need to create a better society with less mental illness, where people are not depressed by how unfair life is that they go on and kill kids in school - but I believe if we reduce large societal inequality this will sort itself out over time.

Parents in my circle are already banning social medias for their kids until they're adults - so over time we'll evolve to get better at ignoring all the crap we get exposed to.

Any country that doesn't have executions by mobs. Used to be most nordic countries. Till they changed their immigration policies.

What if someone printed yellow papers blaming Spain for a ship accident so the us would go to war with them?

Becoming famous always had its risks because of mentally ill people targeting you.

Nothing new.

The trick is being rich without being famous!

People copied and pasted faces of celebrities on another photo since 1990s. Nothing significant happened.

Are you referring to this case?

> In a now deleted post on her X account, Mrs Connolly, from Northampton, wrote: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f*** hotels full of the bastards for all I care… If that makes me racist, so be it.

> The court heard Kay copied, pasted and uploaded Mrs Connolly’s post at 12.27pm on Wednesday from a BBC News report and added the hashtags #standwithlucyconnolly #lucyconnolly #f**northamptonshirepolice #conservative #FaragesRiots #RiotsUK and #Northampton.

> As well as a post which urged people to “mask up” during a protest targeting an immigration law firm, Kay tweeted to his 127 followers at 2.34am: “That’s 100% the plan, plus gloves. No car either so no number plate to trace and a change of clothes ready nearby.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/northampton-bbc-...

> It’s like if someone said “I’m scared of someone bringing a semi-automatic weapon to my school and doing a mass shooting. My country has lax laws about guns and their proper use”. And then you said “in your case the problem is not guns, it’s your country”.

The US has both problems: widespread availability of weapons and a high level of freedom to incite violence through spreading lies about groups. Which is why it sees much more of these incidents than countries which have similar levels of gun ownership.

The non-gun version of the problem is mass stabbings, which are less lethal.

Switzerland allows you to own a gun, but (generally) not to bear it. Huge difference.

I think we need a data Great Reset: all data (and I mean all) must be deleted by a certain date in the future, and all newly collected data must have provenance so in the future the customer can find out that Ford got information from Databroker A which bought it from B which bought it from Microsoft which collected it from what you type in Windows. Companies holding activity data without provenance get the crack-cocaine dealer treatment: officers in jail, everybody fired, investors and lenders fucked, company liquidated and forfeited.

While it is impossible to take back a disclosed secret, we can create a legal framework which issues immediate business-stopping corporate death sentences for spreading that data without consent (or after you revoke consent, yes it needs to be revokable). Your data is so valuable, because now that we have universal function approximators you can be simulated (to a prediction horizon) and that simulation interrogated.

  > There should be a way to cryptographically sign posts (everywhere).

Key signing will not be the solution because it isn't addressing the problem. It exacerbates it.

Not sure the lynch mob would pause to check that the web of trust is unbroken.

I already do this in all my IRCs, Matrices, and Discords

Not really. Though that will average language and poison LLMs. I'm not sure I want either of those to happen.

Besides, topics and shared details are also pii. It's more that they aren't useful in that way until you have scale.

Plus, on HN you can't edit posts after some time.

Idk the state of the art for forensic stylometrics or the precedents but I would be surprised if this hasn’t already been presented as evidence in many (most?) notable jurisdictions. Not definitive evidence but supporting evidence. So far from being declared illegal, it’s probably mostly established as a tool for law enforcement.

Meanwhile gangsters or nation states are probably already working on automated deanonymization and blackmail at scale, but will target the dark web before the public one. Not sure any of this stuff is that changed by the advent of deep fakes and llms tho, probably just boring classical statistics does ok?

I wonder if in this timeline it would cause people to clean up their behavior online and only post things they are comfortable having being linked back to their real identity. Would have a chilling effect.

>Actually thinking about it further you could also easily group people political affiliations, and all kinds of other thoughts, dark, dark stuff!

Already happening at Google and Meta for a decade or more.

Stuff like this is why I tell everyone who does good work in the AI space to remember that they are watched

I treat mine as semi. I mean I'm not trying to hide from the government or anything, but yeah I'll say things I might not want to say under my clear name either. Don't we all? We all wear different masks in different groups. We all are different people in different groups too.

We're human, we all have stuff to "hide". I might want to vent about my boss or work and if they heard it that would certainly take it different than it was intended. We even complain about our friends, especially our close friends. Because no relationship is without conflict. But being human we often have to actualize our feelings with words, because we're social creatures. I'll at times complain about my partner, but that doesn't mean they also aren't my favorite person in the world.

To be human requires some anonymity. And no one should feel like they're going to be scrutinized for every little thing they say.

Does every comment previously attached to your account have a unique username or do they still all share the same?

Sort of moot point considering the multiple HN archives that would still have the original username attached

  > You can't nuke your account. You can close it but your comments remain on the site. 

How would one report this to the EU and force HN to follow the GDPR?

This sounds like saying Text, as a medium, is already destroyed. But as we can see, despite thousands of years of fraud potential, we still use text a medium. We're back to needing witnesses and corroborating evidence.

We've had Photoshop for decades, and I still see pictures everywhere.

It is inevitable at this point that video as 'proof' will be killed. That we cannot do reporting and it destroying democracy is a little too much 'sky is falling'. Democracy existed before video.

The market for content that reassures people their preexisting views are right and valid is huge, evergreen, and held to the lowest possible standard.

I'm not sure I can take seriously arguments of "killing democracy", that undermines whatever point you're making in the same way people that worry about crime and shout "think of the children" or immediately go to "stopping terrorism". Just make your point without hyperbole.

Well, then target dead people. Find someone who died 6 months ago, have AI make them a blasphemer, have the sect look for dead people. After the third or fourth time, they'll stop. Not because they want to stop, but because they don't trust this being another prank by Mullah Achmed the Fool.

used the wrong example there, pineapple on pizza is a nice, delicious, refreshing topping

I am not from the US so no. And when I did visit the US, I was young enough not to have to give my fingerprints at the airports.

And your fingerprints …

You're right -- there's nothing axiomatic about the trustworthiness of pixels, and there was a brief window of Time in human history when photos/videos had the qualities you mentioned, and (sadly) that era will end soon.

Being savvy means not treating photos/videos as "untrustworthy", which (ironically) is one of the things the Western world made fun of the Taliban for -- their fundamentalist view called it "haram":

https://www.deseret.com/1997/10/6/19338048/taliban-army-bans...

I worry about written matter too, and here as well, vast masses of LLM-spewed text will surely pollute the landscape irreversibly.

Lynchings aren't commonly waged based on a solid process of evaluating evidence.

It turns out that humans aren't perfectly rational actors. Actors get hatemail and death threats because of roles they've played, "evidence" that isn't just potentially suspect but actually known to be entirely fictional.

It worked pretty fine with #MeToo. Not saying there was no collateral damage, but the end result was that people now default to not believing such allegations.

It doesn't have to be dangerous allegations. Fabricate a video of your country's dictator carrying a giant Boulder, with a flattering subtitle. This will send a message that videos could be deepfaked to such a degree.

My view on deepfakes:

I was thinking about deepfakes and how to protect from them and my conclusion is; there is no way you can protect from them from the practical point of view but from the legal point of view, governments can make laws where everything shared by somebody else that involves you is presumed fake unless there is substantial circumstantial evidence that says otherwise e.g. witnesses, legitimate metadata etc. etc.

Even before LLMs and GenAI, Photoshop became a synonym for messing around and faking photos so there is nothing new here but now there is more powerful "faking" software available to the masses.

Before computers and digital mass media sharing some compromising photo or tape could've been assumed authentic but now in the era of computers and software there is no way you can tell that something is authentic for sure.

>What if a third party gains access to your social media account(s) and starts posting fake content from there?

You can cause chaos and bad press in the short-term but when the original owner of the account restores ownership of the account everything falls apart. Like the commenter below said it happens all the time and it doesn't have any real impact on anything whatsoever.

It happens all the time. They usually post spam and scam.

>If you were in the US and someone were to make a deepfake of you saying a racial slur, do you think you'd fair better than if you were a blasphemer in a Sharia country?

Of course.

Not every culture deserves to live on, certainly not just because "it has been around" and absolutely not one that lynches people.

Tolerance of intolerance is a bullshit strategy that won't work.

culture has overlap with religion, but culture != religion.

Most (not all) religions are like a cancer, their main contribution to society is dividing people into US vs THEM.

If your religion encourages you to kill someone, MAYBE that’s a problem (not AI)?

I rephrased my comment probably right before you posted this because I felt it was too confrontational.

The problem of people manufacturing evidence by using synthesized voices should eventually result in audio voice recordings losing importance from an evidentiary standpoint. In fact, the quicker the use of it occurs, the quicker it will get devalued. And that is good. Someday soon, someone who sounds like the CEO won't be able to drain the company bank account based solely on trusting his voice. And hopefully, along the same lines, a voice recording of Person X blaspheming will lose its evidential power since it will be so easy to manufacture.

Try to say anything related to sex or sexual freedom in the US and they will immediately lynch you. Welcome to USAbad, a Puritanic republic.

Which is precisely why film producers are trying to get the power to do this to their actors.

They aren't going to use AI to have Tom Cruise in their film. He won't sign these rights away.

But they sure as hell want to have the next Tom Cruise sign those rights away as a condition for being hired to be Random Bystander #4 in a straight-to-streaming C-film.

Then, once he becomes successful and famous, they won't have to pay him a cent to keep using him, forever.

I can't wait for the future where even more of the wealth people who do work generate will be siphoned off to the owners.

I'm sure that impersonation of Taylor Swift really scared the represenatives. A billionaire trying to copy the likeness of another billionaire for votes. I'm sure even some hard staunched conservatives realize how badly that can end.

That it is copied or soundalike does not matter. There are preceding legal cases against using impersonators in commercials that would apply here. It has happened to Tom Waits twice, and both times he sued and won: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6y1kc8Equk

The point is that Geerling is doing Youtube videos in the same field as the products this company is using his voice for. That makes it appear as if Geerling would be endorsing their products. If his voice had been used for, say, a nature documentary then people wouldn't have made the connection that it would have been him.

I imagine it would then depend on the intent and how that voice was presented.

If you got Bob who sounds awfully like Mr Very Famous Guy to record vocal that you then use to train your AI and use that vocal clone to sell your nutritional yeast extract as though it’s Mr Very Famous Guy selling it that would likely be a problem.

If you used the vocal clone to sell it, but said something like “oh hey it’s Bob here lots of people tell me how much I sound like Mr Very Famous Guy but I’m not him” then Mr Famous might have a case for his name being used without permission, but probably not the vocal clone.

But it’s all so new and there’s no precedent.

Given the lawyers are all busy working out whether using copyright protected books and music to train generative AI is legal or not - and have good arguments on both sides - it’s all a bit unclear how stuff like this will work out in the end.

You go to court and see what happens.

Then you'd be able to prove that you actually did that, for one.

That's what happened with Scarlett Johanssen's voice in the OpenAI thing, right? Or at least I think it was a claim at the time.

I mean, it’s the same as trademark disputes; legal standards will slowly be cobbled together from statutes, regulations, and random judges setting precedent. “Confusion in the marketplace” seems like a potentially relevant term — accidentally producing a product similar to an existing person’s voice is one thing, but publishing it in a manner and/or context that makes it seem like that person recorded the lines is something else entirely.

Anyway, given how the election is shaking out on Twitter, I have a feeling political usage will spark legislation and precedent far before commercial usage does. But that’s just a plain guess

And the flip side. What if somebody who sounds like the person you trained on accuses you of stealing their voice? Assuming malice from similarity is going to sometimes lead to wrong results.

If your thing got data of somebody who sounds like somebody else but users use not "somebody" but "somebody else" to generate derivatives then you know your answer:)

I actually like this: it might be the first case of a "support the underdog" phenomenon. Suddenly some voice actor who sounds a lot like the already rich popular one, can get a bunch of gigs by barely talking a bit into an AI and selling their likeness. (doesn't really extrapolate into the future properly, but still not many examples of this)

That’s what courts are for, and sounds like you’d have a defensible case.

You joke but couldn't I just pay a Chinese company to train model for me that sounds like a certain person and use it with impunity?

Sounding like someone certainly isn't illegal and a foreign company isn't going to respond to a lawsuit that aims to determine the source of their training data.

You'd just not have to pretend to be that person in a deceptive way (parody is legal).

Might as well make photoshopping and manual audio tweaking / impersonation illegal, since its the same ballpark, just less effort.

Yeah, which is what my second part is about :). The first part was about using a voice for e.g. promotion.

GP here. I agree. By "lack of precedent" I meant lack of precedent specific to the implications of gen AI's use of data scraped indiscriminately, without attribution or consideration. As far as I can tell, the various cases in progress will (eventually) set some precedent about fair use in this specific context. LLM-owning companies are already hedging future liability by paying for content and/or doing the usual terms of use bait-and-switch (oh yeah, and when you click "okay", you agree to let us use all your data to train our AI models).

The original meaning of the word computer was a person who calculates.

Looks perfectly clear to me.

Or understand ideas. We all web develop sometimes and as the follow up shows, it’s actually your share of web developness in action ;)

On a serious note, please refrain from using “webdev makes dumb” theme here. It’s a beaten cliche that does nothing good to any forum. Have a nice day!

Following this logic I think I can conclude that computers should have been protected from computers. Because they were people who were good at managing computation and now soulless machines replaced the hell out of their profession.

I understand most of your points, but my main question still stands: how do we choose who’s worth sparing and why it should be Ms. Johanson or wlop or my grandma whose ability basically became stolen(“”?) in the 80s.

I believe this has to do with emotion more than anything else. AI theft is closer to the skin than any worker/engineer who was replaced long ago. But at the same time it is another step in human development. We can decide now if having a nice face and/or talking in a specific way is worth being a job or is a worthless skill. Still quite a skill! Just worth not much, akin to adding lots of numbers in your head now.

Whatever we choose, the non-forward looking choice will be crushed by reality, as usual.

In an attempt to add a pithy but trite summary to your good words:

Laws are codified expectations.

That's not what I meant, my comment was just poorly worded.

It's really shitty that they ripped off his voice using AI. In addition, I dislike the trend of using text-to-speech for YouTube videos in general.

This was fine 10 years ago because I would, if I wanted to get an impersonator of someone's voice who carries a lot of weight, I'd have to go through to the work of hunting them down, finding out if they were willing, paying them, or I guess having tons of children and waiting decades and hoping their voice is right for what I need.

Now I can sit at a computer and spend a few hours doing it.

You are completely blowing past the facts of what a person's voice is, and the value it has if that person is someone special to a lot of people. Are there people out there who can do spot on Obama impersonations? Of course. Is the former President not wanting someone who sounds like him to pretend to be him to endorse a local candidate trying to unfairly "fence off" too much of the "voice space"? Give me a break.

On mobile so not looking for the link, but a couple of years back, a motorcycle enthusiast vlogger who was this cute girl had her filter drop live and it was a middle aged guy the whole time. In that case, I recall the viewership accepted him

>There's already VTubers who's whole visual identity is synthetic

No. Their assets are synthetic. Their identity is not. Their value and identity is in the real relationship and trust the creator builds with the audience. And that is what the company in question here tried to imitate. They didn't copy Jeff for his angelic voice, they copy him for the trust implicit in his reputation, name and 750k followers. It's the same reason Chris Pratt still gets hired to do commercials for millions despite the fact that any acting student would do it for 500 bucks and why openAI tried to copy Scar Jo in particular.

All these performances can be done by anyone for nothing, but they have commercial value because of the reputation of the person that's lending their likeness to them. And that's of course also why this is blatantly illegal by the way, we have personality rights and you can't shill your product with someone's likeness without consent, whether that likeness is AI generated or reproduced in some other way.

So, you mean, similarly to how ad targeting works today, companies will optimize voices so that individuals respond accordingly to their targets?

That's convenient, right? AI will be more than perfect and also be able to be imperfect if you want it, it'll just do anything you want. Here's a better prediction: Almost no one wants to listen to whatever low effort trash gets pumped into an advanced TTS.

That's crazy. For dash cam videos you can at least compare if the footage matches with the damage on the cars. And hopefully both parties have video footage, then you can really compare if something doesn't add up.

I think the strictly anthropological view is that it's because of the political and social power you accrue if you can convince people the ancestors are on your side. I'm sure there are several reasons though and I accept that one as likely part of it also.

Poe's law is in full effect with AI. I've heard some absolutely sociopathic takes with what AI should be allowed to do, said with utmost sincerity.

Ah, I misunderstood, thinking that your cousin lives close to your aunt. I was suggesting that somebody physically close could do the video call.

Honestly I'm not the heraldry guy or ancestry guy in my family, but I thought it looked cool and helped make an SVG of it for a shirt my uncle made for all the family one year, so I slapped it in the footer of the blog :)

>I wouldn’t really be confident in identifying a „stolen face“ online because you’re bound to look similar to someone when creating a face. Does that mean that the look was stolen or is it just coincidence?

Luckily, national ID can easily solve that problem offline. It'd be a more interesting problem if some company searched far and wide to identify someone that has a similar face to [famous person]. And that's part of the issue in that there's no way to verify "is my voiced sampled here?". Opening the black box can help with that, but that's something companies are fighting to the death to not allow.

> What is the likelihood of a random AI voice sounding similar to some real online creator?

Given how much data was scraped, less likely than the fact that their data is in fact in the training set.

I googled "Ford v. Milton" and found something regarding the "slayer's rule", which is unlikely to be what you were referring to...

The whole point I made was that it was not her "likeness". Except in the way that the voice of any young woman speaking clearly resembles the voice of any other young woman speaking clearly, because I would argue that if you took 10 random young women's voices who speak clearly (say, 10 voice actresses) and listened to them all together, you wouldn't be able to distinguish them much either.

To be clear I’m not saying it did happen for sure. Only that it’s realistic and not exactly far fetched given everything that’s publicly known.

> they can also interpolate in latent space? How does that actually work?

I don’t know. I assumed it is the case because of the vast and excellent interpolation AI appears to do in other domains.

> what's wrong with asking another one?

It's illegal, you can't hire an impersonator and allude to it being the real deal. That's the issue.

> Is it scummy to hire "discount" Matt Damon instead of Matt Damon?

If you imply you've hired Matt Damon by tweeting something about Matt Damon and your "discount" had a profession as a Matt Damon impersonator, yes. Yes 100%.

This is illegal with or without AI. We've literally had these laws longer than the tech.

>Is it scummy to hire "discount" Matt Damon instead of Matt Damon?

If Matt Damon said no (e.g. leaving a paper trail) and you want people to pretend it's Matt Damon anyway, yes. Look up Ford v. Milton. You can't just go behind an artist's back like that.

If you want to argue about soundalikes in spinoffs, those are discussed in contracts (and those kinds of figures are making 7+ figures as is, so it's fair on them to choose to let them do that).

Issue is that Youtube profits off it while signing away liability. There's no incentive to prevent it.

If you make, say, a webcomic, a big publisher is not allowed to collect and print your comic, or republish it on their ad-riddled website, unless they get your permission and offer whatever compensation you demand. They also can't copy your characters exactly and publish new stories about them, even if all the art and writing is original.

This is a good thing, even though your comic is nothing but a bunch of JPGs--digital patterns--that can be copied infinitely without depriving anyone.

Voice-reproduction rights can get complicated in the AI age, and I don't claim to have the objective moral truth. But there are very good reasons to give legal protection to the creators of digital patterns, as a general principle.

The fact that 93% of the world's legal jurisdictions, including the entire democratic world, doesn't agree with your assertion of absurdity, is pretty good evidence that you are the one with a radical opinion.

You can't just say "Appeal to law fallacy", nothing else, and then move on. You haven't made an argument.

In order for this to be a FALLACY, you have to explain how an appeal to law doesn't work here. Simply appealing to law itself isn't a fallacy.

My voice is even more scarce, there is only one of them in the whole world! I think. Also, we can both own the same land.

I do understand rivalry in economics, but that's not the issue here. The issue is the need to protect individuals from abuse, part of which is the one's right to their own likeness. This likeness is not free for the taking. Now, we can call this owning the likeness, or we can call it something else, but having something, that is not free for taking, sounds an awful lot like owning something.

This is part of natural human behavior. The idea of owning people as physical property is absurd as well, but if you kiss someone's girlfriend you might get punched in the face. The reason this happens is entirely a social construct, but the reality of the situation is no less real.

Social constructs don't not exist just because they are social constructs. The physical world not the extent of reality. Social constructs are also real because we make them real as a part of our own human experience.

> Many social/legal constructs are for lack of a better term, idiotic. Step back for a second and think about what ownership actually implies? Exclusive control over a scarce resource.

It implies whatever society decides that it implies, no? For example, many societies had or have conceptions of land ownership that are dramatically different from the western model, oftentimes to the extent of not having individual land ownership at all.

> Social/legal constructs like owning ideas or the sound of a voice exist not because they make any sort of logical sense

They don't make logical sense to you. Consider that for a very long time in the US the idea of owning people made logical sense to the majority.

> they exist to give privilege and power to certain groups at the expense of others.

Do not almost all forms of ownership do this? Some people own hundreds of thousands to millions of acres of land that I have no right to access. Massive swathes of the surface of the planet that we all share. Is the ability to own land not a far greater privilege than the ability to protect your voice from being cloned without your consent?

>Step back for a second and think about what ownership actually implies?

It implies identity, and control. The former being most relevant here. And yes, if you want to use someone's identity you need to at least get consent.

>Exclusive control over a scarce resource.

"Scarce" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. And in the grand scheme, everything can be "scarce". The internet isn't infinite either, only in a virtual sense (no pun intended).

Meanwhile, thoughts and data are resources, and you can own the idea behind it. Hence, "intellectual property".

> there is no feasible model that explains why one person has control or ownership of it over another.

That's where identity came in. If an inventor got run over tomorrow, there may still be iterations on the invention, but it would completely alter the course of iteration. That's ownership in a sense. Ownership that your ideas can't just be understood or replicated unless you transfer your thoughts to another medium. And like any conversion, data is lost in the exchange.

>they exist to give privilege and power to certain groups at the expense of others.

Yeah, the less off inventors. Do you know why IP is automatically granted? Because someone unaware of the legal channels would just have their own IP signed off once anyone in business gets a whiff of it.

of course, the priveledge still abuse it. But when everything becomes a free for all, the rich get richer.

By law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights

> This Jeff Geerling which I have never heard of

This guy doesn't have 1/10000 of the relevance Metallica had at the time

It's weird that you seem to think a person's level of fame is relevant to a discussion of their legal rights.

> This IP/copyright mentality is so 90s/2000s. Brings back memories of Napster.

The trend has been going against copyright ever since internet was invented. We used to go for passive consumption - radio, TV, books, print magazines. But now that age has passed. We have changed. We prefer interactivity - games, social networks, web searching the billions of contents online, youtube clips commented and shared around. In this age copying is like speaking.

Now comes AI and pushes this trend even deeper - more interactive, more remixing and adapted to the user. We should take a hint - the idea of owning content doesn't make sense anymore. Any content can be recreated in seconds now, or similar content was already posted online years ago. Protecting expression is useless and protecting styles would destroy creativity. Quite a catch-22.

We should take a look instead at new models that popped up in the last decades - open source, creative commons, Wikipedia, open scientific publication. Maybe we need to decouple attribution from payment, like scientific papers, they cite each other without monetary obligations. In social networks comments respond to each other, it would not work if we had to pay to read. Even in real life, people don't pay to hear others speak, and are reusing ideas without issue.

I am aware this sounds bad for copyright, but I am trying to state the reality, not propose my own views. There are deep reasons we prefer interactivity to passive consumption. Copyright was fit for a different age.

How are you on hacker news and never have heard of Jeff Geerling? He's a goat in the ansible and raspberry pi world.

Funny, I first heard of Jeff Geerling over ten years ago in my dev circles.

Your inability to look even few decades into the future to see the impact of this is depressing. You only seem to care about yourself and your current grift.

The danger of this shit can not be understated. Four years ago already there was a video where a deepfake of a president of the USA read a speech: In Event of Moon Disaster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWLadJFI8Pk we of course know Nixon never gave this speech.

What happens when this "AI" is used to sway an election?

Last month a family got hospitalized after eating mushrooms they found and identified from a AI generated book. They didn't know it was AI generated. What happens when and this is not if, alas but when people die from this?

This shit is a danger to democracy and human lives. Napster was not.

You think someone stealing the dude’s voice is the same as people downloading Metallica songs?

Are you trying not to be taken seriously?