DocBug – Page 4 – Intelligence, media technologies, intellectual property, and the occasional politics

The copyright battles over AI art start in earnest

January 19, 2023 / 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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Using DALL-E on video

August 31, 2022 / Machine Learning & AI, Media Technology

Director Karen X. Cheng just posted a cool video where she uses OpenAI’s DALL-E to generate different outfits and then applies them to a video of her walking down the street. DALL-E is designed for images, not video, so after generating the individual key frames she used the (currently free) program EbSynth to map those

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A big win for open access

August 26, 2022 / 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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Best description of latest on Mar-a-Lago raid

August 15, 2022 / Politics

Best description I’ve heard so far about the FBI raid on Trump’s quarters at Mar-a-Lago: EmptyWheel has a nice write-up on how what we know so far lines up with the Espionage Act.

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Tales from Loon: The Quasi-biennial oscillation

July 19, 2022 / Science

One of the things I loved about working at Loon was that we pulled together experts from a wide range of disciplines, so I was constantly learning about things well outside my usual wheelhouse. One of the more unusual things I learned came from Rob, our resident atmospheric scientist, who introduced us to the Quasi-Biennial

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First images from the James Webb

July 12, 2022 / Science

Check out the first images from the NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Folks have also put up some zoomable full-res versions, a slidable comparison of Hubble vs. James Webb images.

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A simple defense of the right to abortion

July 6, 2022 / Politics

A few days ago Kevin Drum lamented that the conservative attacks on Roe vs. Wade are much easier to understand than liberal arguments defending it: Conservatives say, “Abortion isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Constitution and it was illegal almost everywhere before 1973.” In response, liberals stutter and stammer and reel off a few hundred incomprehensible

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Where exactly is the line now?

June 27, 2022 / Politics

So now if Christian Scientists gain a supermajority in a state legislature, can they outlaw all medical procedures? Or is it only Catholic dogma that gets to do that?

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Trying to make stained glass with DALL-E-2

June 19, 2022 / Machine Learning & AI

Scott Alexander’s A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows has some great examples of both the stunning images that OpenAI’s DALL-E-2 system can produce and some of the issues it still has. Some of the problems are fairly straightforward (like text will often come out as well-rendered gibberish) but the most interesting

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Live hearings on the January 6th insurrection

June 9, 2022 / Politics

Quick reminder that the House public hearings on the January 6th insurrection will be streaming live at january6th.house.gov starting today at 5pm PDT. You can also get your pick of full live hearings plus commentary from pretty much every national news outlet except Fox News (naturally), who says they’ll only the hearings “as news warrants.”

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