Vlyn

That one is super easy. Your wife is near you and possibly friends on Facebook with you. The ad system knows that and that's why your wife sees the ad, as there is a high likelihood that you talked with her about this topic. Though the ad seems to have a shitty target audience definition, your wife should never see it if she's not into computers herself (waste of money marketing wise).

This is similar to a friend of yours having a new hobby, looked up a lot of stuff about it online, you hang out with them for two hours at a café and suddenly you get ads for this hobby (as it was very likely a topic in your conversation). No need to record your conversation, people are predictable.

designing a vote weighting system that favors similar instances

Would make the whole thing even worse, as I could create several new instances with 10 bot users each, then hammer out the votes.

The entire problem is that you can't trace back each vote to a genuine user. It would be bad in case of fake instances that create 100 user accounts and upvote/downvote stuff, but you can ban the instance. It would be a disaster if a big instance creates fake votes (like lemmy.world suddenly adds 1000 fake users and uses them to manipulate other instances, if votes were anonymous you couldn't check if it's genuine lemmy.world users or fake accounts).

It would be damn easy to look up the instance and their "users" and see that the users are not genuine. Then ban the whole instance.

The big question is why did this topic come up "out of nowhere"?

And there can be several reasons!

1. You unconsciously saw an ad for it (could even be a billboard while driving) and that's why you started to discuss this topic. If it's a new ad it now also pops up on your phone (as it's a marketing campaign) and you immediately recognize it because you've seen it before and discussed it

2. The ad campaign has been running for ages, but you never paid attention to it. Now that you discussed this topic with a friend you suddenly noticed the ad. Nothing changed ads wise, you just never paid attention to the topic

3. It's a popular topic in general, could be in the news, could be hip at the moment, for some reason you and your friend started to talk about it, where did it come from?

There's so many ways this can go. And if we go back to tracking: All it takes is for a friend of yours to later search something related and it's also hard tracked (and then linked back to you as you hung out with them). Which can be a double whammy. Your phone being "ungoogled" is also worthless if you use Google, Facebook, Instagram or whatever.

This is only partially true. Yes, it's listening for those keywords, but only for them. Sometimes that's even an extra chip in your phone, otherwise it would kill your battery in no time.

Which is one of the reasons you can't just customize the command to whatever you want to say.

The problem isn't keeping votes anonymous, that's easy. The problem is bots/spam. You could just create a new instance and then upvote a post from another instance a thousand times. If the votes are anonymous for the other instance it's tough to say if they are genuine users or just bots.

That's the main issue here, when votes are anonymous you could easily just spam votes with no way to trace it back. If it's a rogue instance then fine, you can ban the whole instance. But imagine if lemmy.world starts using fake votes in the background towards other instances.

When you're literally falling asleep on the couch, finally decide to switch to the bed and your body goes: Nah, I don't want to anymore.

This keeps getting brought up and it's simply not true. No, your phone isn't listening to you, plenty of tests have been done. It could easily be traceable with higher CPU usage, higher battery usage, network usage and so on, but there is zero difference between having a conversation next to your phone or the phone being in a literal sound proofed room.

Meta data, people you spend time with, what you look up online, your age, your hobbies, your interests, ads you have recently seen, location data, .. there's so much about you online that it's easy to predict.

And sometimes you talk about things because everyone else is talking about them. You're not that special.

It can be a bit scary how much you can predict about a person by just using a few simple facts (sex, age, location, income, ..).

I work in a creative field. But companies are companies. If I work for a company and create something, it doesn't belong to a natural person, it immediately goes over to the company.

Not the CEO or CTO or whoever is in management, it belongs to the legal entity. Isn't this a company owning the work I just created? If the CEO dies, the company still owns it.

Only humans can hold copyrights.

Yeah, no. Most copyrighted material is owned by companies, you don't have to be a natural person to hold copyrights. And if a company can hold copyrights, you can also argue it can have fair use.

If I as a human listened to every single song of a band from start to finish, then produced a similar song in the same vein (lyrics / music genre), it would be fair use.

So why would it stop being fair use if an AI does the same thing? Just that the AI can listen to every song of this band and a million other bands, combining them.

But that's not how model training works, it doesn't simply copy and paste entire songs into its training data. It more or less "listens" to it, analyzes it and when you ask to create a rock song for example it just has an algorithm behind it what a song like that would sound like.

But you can't just ask it to generate Bohemian Rhapsody from its data, it would probably get very close depending on the training, but it would never be 100% the same (except the model was only trained on this one song).

Just like you can listen to rock songs and then make your own, that's totally valid. The problem here is of course automation and scale, but saying it's not fair use is dubious.