The thing is that it’s not PURE crap.

It’s kind of like going to a flea market. Most of it is crap and you can still find some decent and good stuff that’s way cheaper than it should be.

The glaring difference between the two is our level of active involvement.

Solidarity is one thing. Actually doing something about Sudan would require some sort of deliberate intervention.

In the case of Gaza we could likely make a huge difference if we just stopped arming the aggressors.

We don’t send arms to Sudan. We don’t send arms to Putin. We don’t send arms to the Sri Lankan military. We don’t send arms to Boko Haram. We don’t send arms to Myanmar.

I’ve been thinking about this exact question recently.

My Austrian grandmother and her sister were working class teenagers during the war. They couldn’t realistically have done anything to stop the Nazis. They didn’t really do much to help but since they were seamstresses they secretly snuck the Jewish family in the building some sewing supplies. It wasn’t much and they stopped when they were told that someone had reported them to the Gestapo. Their experience during the war was dodging bombs and trying to find something to eat.

None of that matters. When I was a kid growing up in the US people regularly made Nazi jokes as soon as they found out about my heritage. Nobody was willing to entertain any ideas that maybe those civilians shouldn’t have been held accountable.

History judged all of Germany and Austria harshly. It judged the civilians harshly and it judged their descendants harshly.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144717
The world is watching.

It’s a bit more than “nobody”.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/09/1154391

The problem is that the minority that is uncomfortable doing or saying anything is backed by half the worlds carrier fleets and thousands of nuclear armed ICBMS.

Maybe.

There have been a number of technologies that provided similar capabilities, at least initially.

When photography, audio recording, and video recording were first invented, people didn’t understand them well. That made it really easy to create believable fakes.

No modern viewer would be fooled by the Cottingley Fairies.
The sound effects in old radio shows and movies wouldn’t fool modern audiences either.
Video effects that stunned audiences at the time just look old fashioned now.

I expect that, over time, people will learn to recognize the low-effort scams. Eventually we’ll reach an equilibrium where most people won’t fall for them and there will still be skilled scammers who will target gullible people and get away with it.

Haha. Maybe.

I doubt the VCs will provide much followup funding if they can’t control the code base but weirder things have happened.

There are a lot of scams around AI and there’s a lot of very serious science.

While generative AI gets all the attention there are many other fields of AI that you probably use on a regular basis.

The reason we don’t see the rest of the AI iceberg is because it’s mostly interesting when you have enormous amounts of data you want to analyze and that doesn’t apply to regular people. Most of the valuable AIs (as in they’ve been proven to make or save a bunch of money) do stuff like inventory optimization, protein expression simulation, anomaly detection, or classification.

It’s otherwise a fairly well written article but the title is a bit misleading.

In that context, scare quotes usually mean that generative AI was trained on someone’s work and produced something strikingly similar. That’s not what happened here.

This is just regular copyright violations and unethical behavior. The fact that it was an AI company is mostly unrelated to their breaches. The author covers 3 major complaints and only one of them even mentions AI and the complaint isn’t about what the AI did it’s about what was done with the result. As far as I know the APL2.0 itself isn’t copyrighted and nobody cares if you copy or alter the license itself. The problem is that you can’t just remove the APL2.0 from some work it’s attached to.

Allies are only ever allies of convenience.

The US was allied with both the USSR and China for the sake of convenience. Right after that war the US allied with its erstwhile enemies, Japan, Germany and Italy for the sake of convenience. The Marshal Islands maintain diplomatic relations with both China and the US for their own convenience.

BRIC (South Africa joined later) was initially coined as a description of quickly emerging economies by a Goldman Sachs economist. Since then it’s become an actual trading block that coordinates on economic policy. It’s very obviously dominated by China but the other members see advantage in joining a club that’s not obviously dominated by the US.

The combined GDP of BRICS nations now exceeds the combined GDP of the G20. If it’s a joke, it’s a pretty successful one.