Posts Tagged ‘Sarah Silverman’

Meta Rips Off The Author And Passes The Savings On To Skynet

Wednesday, September 27th, 2023

It turns out that Meta, AKA Facebook, used a giant database of pirated books known as “book3” for their AI generative training efforts.

Indeed, you can now search an index to see who was ripped off.

Did they rip me off? Not by name, as I have no published novels, but they did ripoff Mike Ashley’s The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction, which has my story “Crucifixion Variations” in it, so yeah.

They ripped off Howard Waldrop:

  • Dream Factories and Radio Pictures
  • Going Home Again: Stories
  • Horse of a Different Color
  • Other Worlds, Better Lives
  • Things Will Never Be the Same
  • They ripped off a whole lot of Joe R. Lansdale.

    They ripped off a whole lot of George R. R. Martin (in multiple languages).

    There’s already been a lawsuit filed against Meta by Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman and Christopher Golden over using their material for training AIs, but there seems to be no mention of pirated books or book3.

    The fact that Meta is not only training AI on author’s works without their permission, but using pirated copies to do so adds insult to injury.

    And probably additional monetary damages from the resulting lawsuits.

    I expect the latest piracy revelations to lead to whole host of new lawsuits…

    Mark Zuckerberg Has Been A Very Bad Robot Boy

    Thursday, July 27th, 2023

    Meta, AKA “The Artist Formerly Known As Facebook,” announced that they just lost $21 billion on their Reality Labs division, AKA the Metaverse, AKA the worst virtual reality environment since January 2022.

    Meta’s second-quarter earnings showed that Reality Labs, its virtual and augmented reality development business, has lost a staggering $21.3 billion since January 2022 — and executives warned the bleeding will only get worse.

    The unit recorded $276 million in Q2 sales this year — down from the $339 million it drew in during Q1, underscoring how VR and AR technology has yet to infiltrate the mainstream.

    The losses were wider than analysts expected, though CFO Susan Li suggested in the report that Meta will continue to invest in the tech, which is used to power the metaverse.

    “For Reality Labs, we expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem,” Li wrote.

    Just last month, Meta unveiled its Quest 3 headset for $499, which Mark Zuckerberg touted as “the first mainstream headset with high-res color mixed reality,” though it’s unclear how successful the tech has been so far.

    Hint: Not at all.

    Just how do you lose $21 billion? That’s a burn rate of over a billion a month. You could hire a mountain of developers and engineers for that money, maybe 100,000 or so of them even at California salary rates. Wikipedia (usual caveats apply) says Occulus only had 17,00 employees in 2022. Meta only paid $2 billion to acquire Occulas (which became Reality Labs) in the first place. Hell, you could fund over 200 startups at $100 million a pop, and it would still be more likely for any one of them to be profitable than Reality Labs.

    Usually you have to be a politician to lose that much money. I wonder if Reality Labs losses might be covering up losses in other divisions. Or if the money is getting siphoned off to somewhere else entirely…

    Earlier this month, Meta found itself on the defense in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by stand-up comic Sarah Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, who alleged that Meta’s artificial intelligence-backed language models were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing the authors’ work.

    The suit against Meta points to the allegedly illicit sites used to train LLaMA, the ChatGPT competitor the company launched in February.

    Naturally, anything involving large corporations ripping off science fiction writers attracts my attention, and I used to bump into Kadrey back when I was on the SF con circuit. The same firm is also suing on behalf of Paul Trem­blay and Mona Awad.

    There probably needs to be some sort of regulation on how much AI generated content can come from any particular living creator. If I feed an AI all of Paul McCarthy’s songs, and ask it to produce a new one based on those, is it copyright infringement?

    I suspect a number of lawyers are going to be getting a lot of money off AI in the near future…

    Sarah Silverman Goes Coup Coup

    Thursday, February 2nd, 2017

    Sarah Silverman, the comedienne who starred in such big hit movies as….

    Sorry, that was the wrong way to start that sentence. My bad. Let’s try again.

    Sarah Silverman, winner of the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics for “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” and the second voice actress to play Fry’s ex-girlfriend Michelle on Futurama, called for a military coup against President Trump:

    Because Twitter is an optimal secure platform from which to launch a military coup, and no one is more likely to cause our soldiers to abandon their sacred oath than a voice actress from Untitled Wreck-It-Ralph Sequel.

    Hollywood liberals are “The Resistance” in the same way that I’m “The Heavyweight Champion of the World,” and the idea our military would follow them in a coup against President Trump is laughable.

    Silverman should stick to voice acting.

    Oh yeah. She was also in The Aristocrats.