Andy Baio

I usually go with the followings: Sidebar[0], Kottke.org[1], Waxy[2]. Obviously, Twitter and Hacker News get interesting links first, so typically these 3 websites repost after something becomes famous. [0] https://sidebar.io/ [1] https://kottke.org/ [2] https://waxy.org/

The purpose of disclosure is to allow people to make their own decisions about how trustworthy I am as a source of information. If I started rejecting access to early models over a desire to avoid conflicts of interest my coverage would be less useful to people. I think most of my regular readers understand that. I was responsible for one of the first widely read reports on the ethics of model training back in 2022 when I collaborated with Andy Baio to cover Stable Diffusion's unlicensed training data: https://waxy.org/2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-used-to-tr… Calling me "their most enthusiastic shill" is not justified. Have you seen what's out there on LinkedIn/Twitter etc? The reason I show up on Hacker News so often is that I'm clearly not their most enthusiastic shill.

> https://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/ That is crazy, and eye-opening. > It breaks my heart that a project I did for fun, on the side, and out of pure love and dedication to the source material ended up costing me so much — emotionally and financially. For me, the chilling effect is palpably real. I’ve felt irrationally skittish about publishing almost anything since this happened. I feel sad for the author.

Among the goals seems to be a bit of well-poisoning. Artists have done this previously by creating art saying, say, "This site sells STOLEN artwork, do NOT by from them", and encouraging followers to reply with "I want this on a t-shirt", which had previously been used by rip-off sites to pirate artwork. See: <https://waxy.org/2019/12/how-artists-on-twitter-tricked-spammy-t-shirt… If art streams are tree-spiked with copyrighted or trademarked works, then AI generators might be a bit more gun-shy about training with abandon on such threads. It's a form of monkeywrenching. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_spiking> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabotage#As_environmental_action>

The author of the original post (Andy Baio) found exactly where the line was. He released a (great) chip tune version of the jazz classic Kind of Blue (named Kind of Bloop), fully handled the music copyrights, and was promptly sued by the cover artist for Kind of Blue who believed that the pixel art cover of Kind of Bloop was not adequately transformative. https://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/

Slow-news / tech-related links: https://thomas.me https://restofworld.org https://themorningnews.org https://waxy.org

Worth noting that this is also currently on the HN front page: https://waxy.org/2022/09/online-art-communities-begin-banning-ai-gener…

The story of the cover art is also worth reading: https://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/

Just another of the myriad examples of how the DMCA is abused with no repercussions to the abusers at all. Remember when Youtube removed a video of someone in their garden with the rationale that the sounds of birds chirping infringed on some company's copyright [1]? And then they upheld the removal even following manual review, so the tired refrain that it was just an automated bot was not even applicable. [1] https://waxy.org/2012/03/youtube_bypasses_the_dmca/

Best example I know of is PocketNES, but that was used by Jaleco in a GBA port: https://waxy.org/2004/07/jaleco_borrows/ Nintendo has written or contracted a lot of emulators themselves. The grandparent may be thinking of the pervasive use of the iNES header format, which originated with an unofficial (though not open source) emulator: https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/INES

"It's surprising to me that no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. " An interesting dynamic of startups. You try to build a great place to work at, [0] and in building that startup you screw it up by building a bigger company. [1] [0] "Managing Software Engineers" ~ http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-software-engineer… [1] "ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up" ~ http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/

The ArsDigita story is interesting. http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/ might be the best textual source on the web, but if you can rustle it up (download link not working for me), Greenspun's IT Conversations interview is a good listen: http://web.archive.org/web/20130729213414id_/http://itc.conversationsn…

I would believe that, was it not for this: "I realized that the U.S. government loves the "PRISM" acronym. There are literally dozens of projects and applications named PRISM at the state and federal level, many with delightfully goofy logos." http://waxy.org/2013/06/these_arent_the_prisms_youre_looking_for&#…

Andy Baio posted in March 2005 about this: "Wordpress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he's been quietly hosting at least 168,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages." source: http://waxy.org/2005/03/wordpress_websi/ Matt acknowledged the issue with this content (cloaked with CSS) and apologized the next month: http://ma.tt/2005/04/a-response/

Sales guy made a mistake. We all do. Anyone else remember Matt's Hot Nacho mistake? Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam: http://waxy.org/2005/03/wordpress_websi/ Follow up: http://waxy.org/2005/04/wordpress_follo/ Matt's Response: http://ma.tt/2005/04/a-response/

There's one case I recall that's close enough. A couple years ago there was a chiptune cover album of the Miles Davis classic Kind of Blue, complete with a pixel-art version of the cover. The photographer of the original cover art sued over the pixelized version. You can read the whole story here: http://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/

There's a really nicely annotated version on waxy.org http://waxy.org/2009/07/code_rush_in_the_creative_commons/ if you haven't watched code rush yet, the annotations are really a fantastic addition to it and i'd suggest starting there instead. edit/comment: the annotations are mostly useful, if like me, you want to rewind to some particular scene when showing part of the film to a friend. i found them pretty useful, but, ymmv :)

I agree wholeheartedly. As any good writing or speaking course will mention, swears are a literary crutch. English especially is a wonderful langauge for wordplay. Like most langauges we have entire genres of humor based on how and which words are used. Most of the swearing I see on the internet is simply a lazy stab at adding adjectives or getting a reaction. I feel the same way about the (over)use as John Hodgeman does about the word "meh."[1] I think you gain an even greater disdain for swearing with the more critical literature you read. Reading Ebert's movie reviews or perhaps Gordon Ramsey's words, you realize they have a kind of eloquence that you don't often see in everyday speech. It is because they work at it, and refined writing is beautiful, but also because they take the time to avoid lazy crutches like swearing. [1]: http://waxy.org/2009/02/john_hodgman_on_meh/

They're not unheard of. Check out this classic of the genre from Philip Greenspun: http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/

I am almost certain a different, happier arrangement could have been worked out if he'd agreed to license the artwork right at the beginning. Maisel has said that he would never license this artwork for that purpose. So there would have been no licensing deal. "And it's worth noting that trying to license the image would have been moot. When asked how much he would've charged for a license, Maisel told his lawyer that he would never have granted a license for the pixel art. "He is a purist when it comes to his photography," his lawyer wrote." [1] 1. http://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/

The episode "The Thinking Machine" of the Nova miniseries "The Machine That Changed the World" is my favorite introduction to the history of AI up until around AI winter. The episode, along with four others, are available here: http://waxy.org/2008/06/the_machine_that_changed_the_world_the_thinkin…

It's possible 37Signals is deliberately repeating its message to those who have just "discovered" their popular blog. Writing original blog content is hard. I don't know how http://waxy.org did it. A lot of popular blogs (Jon Gruber et al.) have turned into aggregators of a sort (people send them items of interest). Dooce.com is an exception - that's her crazy life.

Here's a good example: http://waxy.org/2009/04/all_things_digital_and_transparency_in_online_… The short of it being that identity is paramount online. Stealing content can be a copyright issue, but stepping into someone else's voice and holding someone else's creative content as your own is simply evil. With proper, comprehensive attribution there's some flex to go around, but even then it's generally something done with consent and grace. Cross-posting someone else's comment might just be borrowing their pencil for an argument, but since it's kind of an amazing pencil and now you're showing it off to your friends like it's your own, you should expect cold stares when you give it back.

The classic has to be the ArsDigita story. It seems that Philip Greenspun has removed the story from his site, but I found it elsewhere. http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/

I'm surprised the techcrunch article got more points than the original writeup at http://waxy.org/2008/10/memeorandum_colors I'm also pretty dissapointed this gets credited to me when it was mostly Andy's idea (I just did some math.) Brendan O'Connor did a correlation between our output and a website that uses humans to measure skew at http://anyall.org/blog/2008/10/it-is-accurate-to-determine-a-blogs-bia… which is pretty great. As a statistics and collective intelligence behavior junkie, his blog is pretty good reading, btw.

Penny Arcade[1] had a rant about this very subject this morning: > The big players in this space all happen believe things about other people's intellectual property that are orthogonal to human flourishing. It appears to be endemic in their spaces. Other times, we don't have to work so hard. For example: Perplexity literally duplicates other people's work on its own site. Then, it will generate a podcast based on the uncredited work. They want the same thing as Google's Gemini, in that you'll come to it for a search experience that's owned end to end - powered by your own uncredited work. Gen AI models have also been used to appropriate an artist's distinctive art style[2] in a way that pushes up against the edge of copyright. You've all heard about OpenAI and Scarlett Johansson[3]. This kind of stuff makes the industry look shady. In theory existing copyright law should cover these new AI cases, but if you use something like Figma AI and it "rips off" (as John puts it) an existing app, you might not even realize that you're copying someone else's design because there's no provenance. That makes it harder to follow the law. [1]: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2024/07/01/jobophage [2]: https://waxy.org/2022/11/invasive-diffusion-how-one-unwilling-illustra… [3]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01578-4

Related: "Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model" [0]. It's astonishingly simple to train both LoRAs and Embeddings nowadays -- if you combine it with tech like ControlNet, you can more or less have direct control over the illustration as well (see this example I converted to Hollie Megert's style with barely any effort [1] using the model from [0]) -- but FWIW I was playing with the WhatsApp AI stickers recently and human-made illustrations still have a "je ne sais quoi" that sets them apart, vaguely reminiscent of "realistic" animation vs. "squash and stretch". I would not be worried as an artist*, but I would be worried if I am making assets for corporations in Corporate Memphis [2]. [0] https://waxy.org/2022/11/invasive-diffusion-how-one-unwilling-illustra… [1] https://i.imgur.com/ZwtKug5.jpeg [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis * In fact, I think I'd be excited, it can be a great tool, and people who lack artistic sensibility might find it almost as hard to use as to make art themselves. However, I do think there needs to be some kind of protection from having your 'style' commoditized without consent, using unauthorized images of your own art.

> You are perfectly entitled to write that Star Wars fanfic. Nope. It's a derivative work, and, as such, requires the permission of the people who own the copyright and trademarks. > You are not entitled to make money off it This matters less than you may think. There's a four-part test [1], and profit is considered, but the work not being for-profit doesn't make the work legal. [1] https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107 Here's an old-ish article I like to link to, on Waxy.org, called "No Copyright Intended": https://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/ > Under current copyright law, nearly every cover song on YouTube is technically illegal. Every fan-made music video, every mashup album, every supercut, every fanfic story? Quite probably illegal, though largely untested in court. By all means, read the whole thing. Here's a lawyer's take on it: https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/can-derivative-works-be-copyrighted… > Image yourself an artist (of any sort) who has drawn such great inspiration from another (copyrighted) work that you would like to modify that work to create something new. Are you allowed to do so? Could you get a copyright to your new creation? As with most questions in law, the answer is: it depends. > “A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship” (17 U.S.C. § 101) is called a Derivative Work. The original copyright owner…

No, because it leads to an incoherent policy. Reddit's original policy, for better or for worse, was "anything that isn't illegal." They had to add one or two things to that over the years but they stuck to that. Reddit's policy then became, unofficially, "trust us to get rid of the crap." That sounds fine, but it has problems: 1. it's not the original policy. HN has a "trust us" policy and it works great but it's always had that. HN has never been billed as "come say what you want." Changing the policy is a bait and switch to the old community. 2. It was never admitted to. While switching to the new policy, the official line was that the old policy was still in place. 3. It requires positive social capital. Remember Philip Greenspun's infamous article describing the VCs at ArsDigita as "a group of nursery school children who've stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off"[1]? That's what the reddit admin has been like for months, and it leads to negative social capital. Some guy was shadowbanned but didn't know it for years, patiently posting in subreddits all along. The CEO didn't use the company's only product. If you've ever experienced a dysfunctional internet community -- and who hasn't -- you recognize the patterns of decisions made in a hurry to stop whomever is immediately yelling at you and then trying to justify it with whatever they can cobble together afterwards, and that explanation will be completely…

Excellent quote here: And I really believe that's why we seem to win girls' nationals sections pretty easily every year: most people won’t tell teenage girls (especially the together, articulate ones) that they are lazy and the quality of their work is unacceptable. And sometimes kids need to hear that, or they have no reason to step up. This could apply to boys as well as girls, and indeed to anyone at just about any age; sometimes we need to be told that we're not measuring up. I am reminded of Philip Greenspun's story about the venture capitalists who wrecked ArsDigita, the company he had built (from http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/): [F]or most of this year Chip, Peter, and Allen [the VC Board members and CEO] didn't want to listen to me. They even developed a theory for why they didn't have to listen to me: I'd hurt their feelings by criticizing their performance and capabilities; self-esteem was the most important thing in running a business; ergo, because I was injuring their self-esteem it was better if they just turned a deaf ear. I'm not sure how much time these three guys had ever spent with engineers. Chuck Vest, the president of MIT, in a private communication to some faculty, once described MIT as "a no-praise zone". My first week as an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student I asked a professor for help with a problem. He talked to me for a bit and then said "You're having trouble with this problem because you don't know anything and…