I can’t believe it’s not battery!

Most of what you perceive as “taste” is just using your sense of smell on food within the mouth, where it is very close to smell receptors.

To isolate taste informally, pinch your nose, stick your tongue out, and put food directly on the tongue when it’s outside your mouth. You’ll find that by itself your tongue can’t distinguish many flavors, that’s why everything tastes terrible when you have Covid or a bad cold.

No, the paper says it shares a receptor with sour, not that it tastes like sour.

Just as “orange” and “purple” have receptors in common but are not perceived as the same.

Umami is the fifth flavor. This paper is about the sixth, which doesn’t seem to have a name other than “ammonium chloride”.

Democrats didn’t vote to vacate because they like to watch chaos. They simply will not support McCarthy unless he offers something in return. Their vote is a bargaining chip and they aren’t throwing it away.

¡At least two of those languages have the same problem!

Or, as millions of people have done, you could learn to read from right to left.

¿And don’t you hate how US punctuation is at the end? ¿If you read an entire sentence, but you don’t even know it is a question until you’re at the end, then how do you know which intonation to use? ¡English is subpar and something should be done about that!

It must be tiring at work waiting for the clock to finally strike 00:5pm.

They are fine with their jobs because they have other jobs that pay them.

Your idea would mean the end of professional musicians. Music performance would be mainly for people with lots of leisure time, something rich people would do as a hobby. Like playing polo.

If your job stopped paying you, and told you to rely on donations from your clients/customers, then I’m pretty sure you’d find a different job.

In the movie industry, everyone usually signs a work for hire contract that specifies who will have the rights to the completed film.

However, in a recent case the director (Alex Merkin) did not sign a contract and then tried to claim copyright afterwards. The court said that directors have no inherent copyright over film:

We answer that question in the negative on the facts of the present case, finding that the Copyright Actʹs terms, structure, and history support the conclusion that Merkinʹs contributions to the film do not themselves constitute a ʺwork of authorshipʺ amenable to copyright protection. … As a general rule, the author is the party who actually creates the work, that is, the person who translates an idea into a fixed, tangible expression entitled to copyright protection. … But a directorʹs contribution to an integrated ʺwork of authorshipʺ such as a film is not itself a ʺwork of authorshipʺ subject to its own copyright protection.

So you believe that if you download an mp3 and claim you are “analyzing” it, then you can’t be liable for IP infringement?

Wow, I wonder why the Napster defendants never thought of that. They could have saved tens of thousands of dollars.

Simple question:

If you are college student, learning to write professionally, is it fair use to download copyrighted books from Z-Library in order to become a better writer? If you are a musician, is it fair use to download mp3s from The Pirate Bay in order to learn about musical styles? How about film students, can they torrent Disney movies as part of their education?

I’m certain that every court in the US would rule that this is not fair use. It’s not fair use even if pirated content ultimately teaches a student how to create original, groundbreaking works of writing, music, and film.

Simply being a student does not give someone free pass to pirate content. The same is true of training an AI, and there are already reports that pirated material is in the openAI training set.

If openAI could claim fair use, then almost by definition The Pirate Bay could claim fair use too.

Again, it’s not a question of reproducing books in an LLM. The allegation is that the openAI developers downloaded books illegally to train their AI.

You need to pay for your copy of a book. That’s true if you are a student teaching yourself to write, and it’s also true if you are an AI developer training an AI to write. In the latter case, you might also need to pay for a special license.

Is it possible that the openAI developers can bring the receipts showing they paid for each and every book and/or license they needed to train their AI? Sure, it’s possible. If so, the lawyers who brought the suit would look pretty silly for not even bother to check.

But openAI used a whole lot of books, which cost a whole lot of money. So I wouldn’t hold my breath.

the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the effect of the use upon the potential market.

Yes, and I named three of those factors:

the key questions are often whether the use of the work (a) is commercial, or (b) may substitute for the original work. Furthermore, the amount of the work copied is also considered.

And while you don’t need to meet all the criteria, the odds are pretty long when you fail three of the four (commercial nature, copying complete work rather than a portion, and negative effect on the market for the original).

Think of it this way: if it were legal to download books in order to train an AI, then it would also be legal to download books in order to train a human student. After all, why would a human have fewer rights than an AI?

Do you really think courts are going to decide that it’s ok to download books from The Pirate Bay or Z-Library, provided they are being read by the next generation of writers?

If a musician doesn’t have the right to their own work, it’s because someone offered to pay them for the rights and they accepted.

Is that in their favor? I think so, considering the alternative is to not get paid and not have rights to their work.

And not to go too far off topic, but publicly funded research is generally not aimed at drug development, it is aimed at discovering the basic science behind how the body works (human body or otherwise).

If you want a clinical trial that proves a particular drug can actually help patients, you will need to find a company to pay for it. The government almost never pays for clinical trials (I think the COVID vaccine might have been an exception). Clinical trials are far more expensive than basic science, and patents are the carrot to get the private sector to pay for them.

Yes, it absolutely hinges on fair use. That’s why the very first page of the lawsuit alleges:

“Defendants’ LLMs endanger fiction writers’ ability to make a living, in that the LLMs allow anyone to generate—automatically and freely (or very cheaply)—texts that they would otherwise pay writers to create”

If the court agrees with that claim, it will basically kill the fair use defense.

No, it doesn’t.

It defends web scraping (downloading copyrighted works) as legal if necessary for fair use. But fair use is not a foregone conclusion.

In fact, there was a recent case in which a company was sued for scraping images and texts from Facebook users. Their goal was to analyze them and create a database of advertising trackers, in competition with Facebook. The case settled, but not before the judge noted that the web scraper was not fair use and very likely infringing IP.

I know the model doesn’t contain a copy of the training data, but it doesn’t matter.

If the copyrighted data is downloaded at any point during training, that’s an IP violation. Even if it is immediately deleted after being processed by the model.

As an analogy, if you illegally download a Disney movie, watch it, write a movie review, and then delete the file … then you still violated copyright. The movie review doesn’t contain the Disney movie and your computer no longer has a copy of the Disney movie. But at one point it did, and that’s all that matters.