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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • You must be some kind of black belt master in black and white thinking 🤡. Biden literally got workers their first ever paid sick days after decades of not being able to even call in sick, pressured companies to drop their draconian attendance policies, and you’re here crying about him ‘abandoning the working class’? Lmao get real


  • FatCat@lemmy.worldtoLate Stage Capitalism@lemmy.worldHow did this happen?
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    13 days ago

    US rail companies grant paid sick days after public pressure in win for unions https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/01/railroad-workers-union-win-sick-leave?CMP=share_btn_url

    When Joe Biden and Congress enacted legislation in December that blocked a threatened freight rail strike, many workers angrily faulted Biden for not ensuring that the legislation also guaranteed paid sick days. But since then, union officials says, members of the Biden administration, including the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, and labor secretary, Marty Walsh, who stepped down on 11 March, lobbied the railroads, telling them it was wrong not to grant paid sick days.

    “We’ve made a lot of progress,” said Greg Regan, president of the Transportation Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, the main US labor federation. “This is being done the right way. Each railroad is negotiating with each of its individual unions on this.”







  • It’s funny you mention the Katy Perry chord case, because Damien Riehl, who made the argument I referenced in my original post, actually talked about this exact case in the podcast I mentioned. He noted that Katy Perry was initially sued and a jury awarded $2.8 million over a very simple melody that appeared over 8,000 times in Riehl’s dataset of generated melodies. However, after Riehl gave his TED talk about his “All the Music” project in early 2020, the judge reversed the jury verdict, saying the melody was unoriginal and therefore uncopyrightable.






  • Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is “theft” are misunderstanding key aspects of copyright law and AI technology. Copyright protects specific expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. When AI systems ingest copyrighted works, they’re extracting general patterns and concepts - the “Bob Dylan-ness” or “Hemingway-ness” - not copying specific text or images.

    This process is more akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages. The AI discards the original text, keeping only abstract representations in “vector space”. When generating new content, the AI isn’t recreating copyrighted works, but producing new expressions inspired by the concepts it’s learned.

    This is fundamentally different from copying a book or song. It’s more like the long-standing artistic tradition of being influenced by others’ work. The law has always recognized that ideas themselves can’t be owned - only particular expressions of them.

    Moreover, there’s precedent for this kind of use being considered “transformative” and thus fair use. The Google Books project, which scanned millions of books to create a searchable index, was found to be legal despite protests from authors and publishers. AI training is arguably even more transformative.

    While it’s understandable that creators feel uneasy about this new technology, labeling it “theft” is both legally and technically inaccurate. We may need new ways to support and compensate creators in the AI age, but that doesn’t make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or unethical.