"Don't question my missing sanity"

What if...

So a free tool called GLAZE has been developed that allows artists to cloak their artwork so it can't be mimicked by AI art tools.

Glaze is not "poisoning the data set." The data set is "art what people post on the internet" and Glaze is part of that, along with animated gifs, patchwork mosaic pictures, badly-photoshopped memes, and so on. Putting a filter on artwork before publishing it is not new - and yet nobody is complaining about "this photo was taken in the daytime but you put a blue filter on it to look like night! How dare!"

Now, if the AI art folks had asked permission to use an archive that sad "Best Fantasy Book Cover Settings," and then the artists started using Glaze, the AI pushers might have a point. What the AI generates based on the pictures won't look like fantasy book cover settings; what they agreed to and what they received were different.

But if they're just scraping deviant and tumblr and individual art sites... the data isn't "poisoned" because it contains data not visible to the human eye. If the artists all start using steganography to put hidden messages in the pictures, like in The Martian... that is not poisoning anyone's data. Not the artist's fault if the data includes parts you didn't notice at first view.

The AI bots were not promised access to artwork that would look similar to the original after the AI bot analyzed it. No data is being poisoned; it's just changed to adapt to a new environment.

CONGRATS AI BOTS! You have spawned your very own Human Consensus Construct that is reacting to changes in the community! The AI bots are being treated like people - like hostile or at least annoying people - and communities are taking the kind of actions they always take against unwanted encroachment.

They make their resources harder to access. In this case, the resources aren't "art" which is sticking around but "pictures that both machines and humans recognize as matching a particular set of keywords."

And no. They weren't promised machine-readable art that could be twisted around into slightly different pics that humans would still recognize.

This order is a preliminary injunction - this means that the case isn't over and books aren't ordered to be permanently returned, just that they have to be returned at least until the case is over. This doesn't diminish what a good result this was, though! First, it means those books will be available while the case is ongoing, and second, one of the factors a court considers when granting a preliminary injunction is likelihood of success on the merits.

It's not just that the books have to be returned! The judge also enjoined the county from removing any OTHER books while the case is ongoing!

In the bad news, the court dismissed the portion of the plaintiff's complaint trying to restore the libraries' access to OverDrive (an e-book lending system) as moot b/c the library system is now using Bibliotheca (a different e-book lending system). This sucks, b/c Bibliotheca doesn't provide e-book access to all the books at issue (see previous posts about how much existing e-book lending laws and practice suck). However, the court dismissed the claims relating to OverDrive without prejudice (meaning the plaintiffs can file the same claims again) and clearly lays out what the plaintiffs would need to include in a new pleading - specifically naming the books at issue that are not available through Bibliotheca - in order to be likely to clear a motion to dismiss.

Obligatory cheer line: "The Court follows our many sister courts in holding that there is a protected liberty interest in access to information in a public library."

Not relevant to any of the underlying issues, but very funny: The defendants' attorney attempted to engage in Shenanigans! during litigation by donating the books in question to a "in-house checkout system" (that patrons do not know about and cannot see what books are available) so that he could argue the claims with regard to the physical books was also moot and tried to keep the fact that he done this anonymous by claiming attorney-client privilege. (The court said: lol, no. On both fronts.) (Also, that's why the order specifies that the books have to be added to the catalogue and it has to show they are available for checkout. Because Shenanigans! have already been attempted.)

He’s not named oBI-wan kenoBI for nothing ✨

You can get a high quality print of this piece on my Inprnt ✨

To make things even more enraging, this is a literal comment a legislator made about people with Turners syndrome: “A person in that state, I don’t think, would want to undress in front of even fellow females”.

This comment makes it clear, I think, their goal. They don’t think that classing intersex people as disabled would help us. They see disabled and intersex bodies as something wrong, something to be hidden away from all the ‘normal’ people. They see our bodies as something shameful and something impossible to be happy in. They don’t see us or our bodies as worthy of existence in society.

Darth Vader – “Might of the Empire” | via starwars.com