That high-altitude balloon from China

/ Technology

As you’ve no doubt heard, a couple days ago a high-altitude balloon from China drifted into US airspace and has been causing a minor rift. China said it was a civilian weather research balloon that blew off course while the Pentagon claims it was being used for “surveillance”. Over the past few days various law-makers got lots of sound-bites slamming China, Biden or whoever else they wanted while the balloon drifted across the central US, and military jets shot it down once it reached the Atlantic.

I don’t know much about US-China diplomacy or the finer points of espionage, but after 10 years working at Loon I do know something about high-altitude ballooning.

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A few more points on that lawsuit against Stable Diffusion

/ Intellectual Property

One of the big claims in the class-action lawsuit against Stability AI is that Stable Diffusion in some way contains all its training data, and is therefore a derivative work it its own right: Because a trained diffusion model can produce a copy of any of its Training Images—which could number in the billions—the diffusion

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The copyright battles over AI art start in earnest

/ Intellectual Property

Well, the long-anticipated copyright battles over AI-generated content have finally started. Last week a group of artists announced they are suing Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt for using their artwork (and that of literally millions of other artists) to train their machine learning systems, claiming doing so violates their copyrights. And yesterday Getty Images announced

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A big win for open access

/ Intellectual Property

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) just announced that all publications and supporting data stemming from federally-funded research must be soon also be made available to all, without an embargo period or cost. The Open Access movement has made a lot of headway since Aaron Swartz‘s early activism, and since 2013

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