I still get emails from my dormant account, and according to my Gmail, the sender is, “X (formerly Twitter),” so I don’t think we’re done with that yet.

🤡

I think you’re giving him way too much credit. Ever since the PayPal days he had this idea for an, “everything app,” a digital-marketplace/wallet/messaging/social media/anything-else-you-could need-online-app called X. The concept and name are profoundly stupid, but he was so dedicated to his vision he got booted from PayPal because he wouldn’t give up on it. I think it’s much more like he legitimately believes he can make Twitter into this bloated super-app (and maybe make some changes for the right-wing trolls that support him along the way) rather than slowly killing the app he payed $44 billion to aquire.

No. Copyright laws originally allowed creators to profit of their work for 28 years, which is perfectly fair and reasonable. Corporate lobbying extended copyright to 70 years past the author’s death, which is obviously insane, since creators can’t profit off their work after they die. But just because corporations perverted the law in an attempt to retain IP indefinitely, it doesn’t mean that copyright law itself is bad, and wanting reasonable protection for an authors IP doesn’t make you a useful idiot.

At my last job my direct manager had to explain to upper management multiple times that X role and Y role could not be combined because it would require someone to physically be in multiple places simultaneously. I think about that a lot when I hear about these corporate plans to automate the workforce.

In my experience, 100% of executives don’t actually know what their workforce does day-to-day, so it doesn’t really surprise me that they think they can lay people off because they started using ChatGPT to write their emails.

What are you talking about? It was the go-to app for journalists for a decade. They could live report from events in a simple, chronological thread, or collect eye witness reports by quote tweeting personal accounts. I followed the Charlottesville and January 6th riots in real time by reading journalists threads. There was a lot of trival or even harmful bullshit on Twitter, but the way journalists used it was a huge positive.

That seems a little reductive. I’ve never moderated anything, but I bet if I spent years building up a community I would also find it hard to just walk away.

I stopped letting YouTube save my watch history years ago because their suggestion algorithm became too intrusive: watch a quick cooking tutorial, get nothing be cooking channels, look up the proper way to use a toggle bolt, YouTube wants to teach me how to re-shingle a roof. It was out of control.

First, they took away my home screen, because they claimed they couldn’t reccomend videos without my watch history (even though they’d done it for years). Then they took away the shorts tab, because they said they couldn’t reccomend shorts without my watch history (even though they’d done it for months). So now I just have my subscriptions, a curated list of things I actually want to watch. They’ve punished me with the product I wanted this whole time.

…TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn’t sell. It also would lose access to US-based web hosting services.

Oh no. Where would children act out jokes they stole from old tweets?

It’s where a lot of centralized communities are for niche topics, so it’s kinda hard to just drop it entirely. I haven’t posted on Reddit since moving to Lemmy, but I still lurk on some of my old subs for news and events in my city or to keep up to date on some of my hobbies. I can get memes and news here, but for the hyper-specific stuff I can either lurk on Reddit or dust off my Facebook account and try to find a relevant Group. Given the choice, I’ll take Reddit.

Yeah, I’d agree with that. I hope it comes up at trial.

Yes, but it’s new territory in the sense of AI and creative works. If I were to use a photo of Tom Hanks for commercial purposes, that would be clearly stealing his likeness. If I were to create a drawing or painting of Tom Hanks, it becomes a lot less clear cut, and the answer depends on weather my work can be considered, “transformative.”

Many people using AI today are claiming that the works being created are transformative; they’re not using a picture of Tom Hanks, AI is creating a picture of Hanks from existing pictures, just like a painter uses references. This is essentially what the creators of the Carlin special are saying in their disclaimer; this is an AI impression of Carlin, not the real Carlin, and should be treated like any comedian doing an impression.

This is the new territory. I don’t know how the courts will rule, but based on the recent ruling against the Warhol estate, there will be a high bar for what is considered transformative.

You couldn’t sell that game, even if you created your own assets, because Mega Man is a trademarked character. You could make a game inspired by Mega Man, but if you use any characters or locations from Mega Man, you would be violating their trademark.

AI, celebrity likeness, and trademark is all new territory, and the courts are still sorting out how corporations are allowed to use a celebrities voices and faces without their consent. Last year, Tom Hanks sued a company that used an IA generated version of him for an ad, but I think it’s still in court. How the courts rule on cases like this will probably determine how you can use AI generated voices like in your Reptilian Pope example (though in that case, I’d be more worried about a lawsuit from Futurama).

This lawsuit is a little different though; they’re sidestepping the issue of likeness and claiming that AI is stealing from Carlin’s works themselves, which are under copyright. It’s more similar to the class action lawsuit against Chat GPT, where authors are suing because the chatbot was fed their works to create derivative works without their consent. That case also hasn’t been resolved yet.

Edit: Sorry, I also realized I explained trademark and copyright very poorly. You can’t make a Mega Man game because Mega Man, as a name, is trademarked. You could make a game that has nothing to do with the Mega Man franchise, but if you called it Mega Man you would violate the trademark. The contents of the game (levels, music, and characters) are under copyright. If you used the designs of any of those characters but changed the names, that would violate copyright.