3x44: The Loch Dustbinness Monster

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and special guest star Alan Pope present Bad Voltage, in which intelligence is artificial, snaps are un-ned, and art is what you make it:

  • [00:04:00] popey's latest tool is unsnap, which helps you "quickly and easily migrate from using snap for applications to flatpak", and we'll get into how it works and why it exists
  • [] AI-generated artwork. Aza Raskin made a very cool AI-generated video for Zia Cora's song "submarines", where he put together a list of text queries and then used AI algorithm Disco Diffusion to generate images as video frames. This sort of AI-generated imagery and art is increasingly common, whether This Person Does Not Exist or This Bench Does Not Exist or National Novel Generation Month or whatever. But what are the wider ramifications of this, for ownership, collaboration, and open source? What are your intuitions in this: is a list of text descriptions of an image really the "source code" for that image? If someone uses the same queries that you did, is their work a derivative work of yours? Would you feel delighted or ripped off if that happened? This is all a new area, and it's evolving very fast: where are the precedents for this sort of collaborative art creation and where should we be drawing inspiration and understanding?

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

Download from https://badvoltage.org

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

While I’m on-board for the future where a teenager can basically “prototype” a television show idea by typing in a script, my concern is basically the GitHub Copilot problem again, where they pretend that neural networks are more sophisticated than they are to shame people for thinking that the exact copy of their work is a copy and not a complete coincidence based on a creative process. And then you get the pundits who want to shame the people who don’t want their work exploited by fabricating some mythical past when everybody who shared things hated copyright, and so needs to support the multinational corporation…