BlueMonday1984

Update on the character.ai lawsuit:

Gizmodo just reported on the story - in addition to the suicide that kicked this litigation off, they've also discovered an hour-long screen recording where a test account (self-reported as thirteen years old) gets sexted relentlessly by the site's chatbots.

So, in addition to driving one specific teen to suicide, character.ai is also facing accusations that their bots are sexually harassing children.

From the looks of things, that's how their business model works.

Okay, quick prediction time:

• Even if character.ai manages to win the lawsuit, this is probably gonna be the company's death knell. Even if the fallout of this incident doesn't lead to heavy regulation coming down on them, the death of one of their users is gonna cause horrific damage to their (already pretty poor AFAIK) reputation.

• On a larger scale, chatbot apps like Replika and character.ai (if not chatbots in general) are probably gonna go into a serious decline thanks to this - the idea that "our chatbot can potentially kill you" is now firmly planted in the public's mind, and I suspect their userbase is gonna blow their lid from how heavily the major apps are gonna lock their shit down.

Character.ai is getting sued thanks to one of their users killing himself, and The New York Times is talking about it (there's also a piece by Gary Marcus talking about a previous incident if you're interested).

Like the copyright situation I previously mentioned, I suspect this is also gonna make potential investors wary of investing in AI post-bubble. Even if you manage to convince investors that you won't get DMCA'd into oblivion, they're still gonna be wary of the potential for a Dasani-level PR nightmare.

Of course, that's assuming that Section 230 protects you from being held liable for what your autoplag does - if Ms. Garcia, whose son's suicide prompted this entire mess, succeeds in court, the legal precedent set means you're likely gonna have to worry about being sued if/when someone ends up injured/killed/defamed/otherwise fucked up because of its output..

Elon's managed to stay off of K-Dot's radar so far. We wanna see the diss, we need Elon to start some shit

what’s fucking bizarre is the Iron Man writers seem to swear their version of Tony Stark was based on Musk, and we know now Musk’s nothing like that. so looking back with more seasoned eyes: how much of the first Iron Man was just propaganda too? of course there’s all the libertarian shit — whose idea was all that, actually?

You want my suspicion, Marvel were probably taking their cues from the public image SpaceX/Tesla's marketing and/or Musk's PR team had put out about the guy - as an eccentric genius par excellence who'd save humanity from global warming and/or get us to Mars.

My pet theory is that Robert Downey Jr is the reason Elon musk is as successful as he is.

Considering RDJ's role as Tony Stark seems to have given Musk the template he used for his public rise to fame, you may be on to something.

Between the gen-AI industry's nonstop lawsuits and public embarrassments like Google's glue pizza debacle, I'd bet good money Microsoft and OpenAI are gonna struggle to convince local journos that gen-AI's alleged benefits are worth the inevitable retractions/lawsuits/general pain and suffering.

We're gonna have enough material for a Elon diss track at this rate

Okay, personal thoughts:

This is just gut instinct, but it feels like generative AI is going to end up becoming a legal minefield once the many lawsuits facing OpenAI and others wrap up. Between the likes of Nashville's ELVIS Act, the federal bill for the COPIED Act, the solid case for denying Fair Use protection, and the absolute flood of lawsuits coming down on the AI industry, I suspect gen-AI will come to be seen by would-be investors as legally risky at best and a lawsuit generator at worst.

Also, Musk would've been much better off commissioning someone to make the image he wanted rather than grabbing a screencap Aicon openly said he was not allowed to use and laundering it through some autoplag. Moral and legal issues aside, it would have given something much less ugly to look at.

~~Kendrick~~ Zitron dropped - its mainly focusing on Prabhakar Raghavan's recent kicking upstairs, and Google's bleak future.

Main highlight was this snippet:

I am hypothesizing here, but I think that Google is desperate, and that its earnings on October 30th are likely to make the street a little worried. The medium-to-long-term prognosis is likely even worse. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Google's ad business is expected to dip below 50% market share in the US in the next year for the first time in more than a decade, and Google's gratuitous monopoly over search (and likely ads) is coming to an end. It’s more than likely that Google sees AI as fundamental to its future growth and relevance.

In other news, there's been a statement on AI training that's racked up over 10k signatures, which is unsurprisingly lambasting the rampant stealing that went into creating the autoplag machines:

Now, I'm way too much of a fan of sidenotes, so I'll whip one out:

Beyond simple content theft being publicly lambasted, I suspect that even licensed use of artists' work for gen-AI will ignite some controversy - if Eagan Tilghman's run-in with controversy last year is any indication, any usage of gen-AI, regardless of context, will be met with hostility.