Amit Gupta likes you!

Hi, AI ethicist + fanfiction expert here. (This is one of those times where I feel uniquely qualified to comment on something…)

I’m seeing this weird game of telephone about the Sudowrite AI that I think started out pretty accurate, but now has become “Elon Musk created an AI that is stealing your fanfiction” (which frankly gives him far too much credit). I can probably say more about this, but here are a few things that I want to clarify for folks, which can be boiled down to “Elon Musk has nothing to do with this” and “this is nothing new”: Elon Musk is not involved in any way with Sudowrite, as far as I can tell. Sudowrite does, however, use GPT-3, the widely-used large language model created by OpenAI, which Elon Musk co-founded. He resigned in 2018, citing a conflict of interest due to Tesla’s AI development. It wasn’t until after he left that OpenAI went from being a non-profit to a capped for-profit. Elon Musk doesn’t have anything to do with OpenAI currently (and in fact just cut off their access to Twitter data), though I can’t find anything that confirms whether or not he might have shares in the company. I would also be shocked if Elon actually contributed anything but money to the development of GPT-3.

Based on Sudowrite’s description on their FAQ, they are not collecting any training data themselves - they’re just using GPT-3 paired with their own proprietary narrative model.  And GPT-3 is trained on datasets like common crawl and webtext, which can simplistically be described as “scraping the whole internet.” Same as their DALL-E art generator. So it’s not surprising that AO3 would be in that dataset, along with everything else (e.g., Tumblr posts, blogs, news articles, all the words people write online) that doesn’t use technical means to prohibit scraping. 

OpenAI does make money now, including from companies like Sudowrite paying for access to GPT-3. And Sudowrite itself is a paid service. So yes, someone is profiting from its use (though OpenAI is capped at no more than 100% return on investment) and I think that the conversations about art (whether visual or text) being used to train these models without consent of the artist are important conversations to be having.

I think it’s possible that what OpenAI is doing is legal (i.e., not copyright infringement) for some of the same reasons that fanfiction is legal (or perhaps more accurately, for reasons that many for-profit remixes are found to be fair use), but I think whether it’s ETHICAL is a completely different question, and I’ve seen a huge amount of disagreement on this.

Probably Puffed: baked-to-order soufflé

Bubble Market: curated selection of fine mineral waters

Four Feet Good: artisanal pickled pig feet

Fugu-about It: freshly de-toxified pufferfish

Grandma’s Candy Bowl

Benihana to Go: portable, grill-and-juggle-your-own teppanyaki 

The Protein Pros: nutmeat and muscle milk

The Pig and The Pendulum: traditional buried Kālua pig

Tofu Tom: vegan whole turkey legs

Olive Gardenette

We know you’re anxiously waiting for news about this year’s festival, but you’ll have to wait a few more days. Today, we’re finally ready to reveal something we’ve worked on for the last six months. And we’re kind of freaking out.

For the last four years, our goal with XOXO was to build a community around independently-produced art and technology.

The festival is one way to do that, and it’s worked great. People have left their jobs and started new projects and companies after attending, made new friends who became collaborators, and self-organized XOXO meetups around the country.

But there’s only so much you can do in four days every year.

So, this fall, we’re taking the ideas behind XOXO and opening a permanent, year-round space: a 13,000 square foot industrial building in Portland’s Central Eastside.

Our friends at Instrument have been supporters of XOXO since the beginning—here’s their writeup from last year—and with their help, we’re taking over the lease on their incredible workspace, a former World War II ship-building factory.

We hope to bring together some of our favorite people and projects in indie art and tech under one roof, as well as a handful of startups working on tools that help people stay independent.

And, of course, we’re ridiculously excited to have our own space to run weird and wonderful events year-round.

This is, without question, the biggest and scariest thing we’ve ever done. It’s risky, expensive, and won’t work without you.

So, if you have any interest in being a part of it, go check out the teaser site and sign up to get notified. We’re looking for independent creators and like-minded startups to join the space, and a small group of patrons to help subsidize the cost for those who can’t afford it.

Like the festival, this is an experiment. It might fail horribly — or, like the festival, it might end up bigger and better than we ever dreamed.

The next stage of XOXO is 13,000 square feet of raw potential. Let’s fill it together.

Issue No10 will be on sale online starting January 20th, ships January 26th. Subscribe now.

You might have seen the video on the home page of our website (and if you haven’t, it’s embedded at the bottom of this post). It’s pretty funny. And, just like it claims, it really does tell the story of how Sandwich Video got on Slack. Long ago we promised to publish the transcripts of the conversation that lead to the creation of the video. And now, for you dear reader: behold!

Wait, WUT?

Every so often, when I am sitting alone with my phone (sad panda) and have some time to kill, I log into the anonymous internet: usually WUT and Secret.

After spending most of the last decade on services that need your actual identity, I’ve been curious about these services that allow you to leave your real names behind. I think the late 90s were the last time I personally sought out services where I was anonymous or pseudonymous. Ever since then, I’ve been bringing together my identity into one namespace (@naveen).

One of the immediate benefits in such services is that your words carry weight and legitimacy on their own. You don’t scan to see who posted it before deciding whether to start reading it. Twitter democratized things in the sense that I could post something in the same space (and potential audience) as someone else, but if he started with more followers or a bigger brand than me, you would pay attention to and retweet his post way more than mine (rich get richer). With these anonymous services, none of that matters – your words are the only thing that’s important and they carry themselves.

Sometimes, you can use these services just to have a public conversation of your thoughts. Perhaps these are like the things you mutter to yourself in an empty room when you know no one else is listening. It could be frustration; things you say out loud that you don’t even realize you are saying out loud; future conversation you’re rolling around in your head; &c. (Oh god, I can’t believe I just admitted that here like a crazy person, but come on, surely others do this too.) I find that the majority of posts on both services are of this nature: things that would otherwise probably have never been captured.

In the handful of times I’ve used Secret, I found I only posted things in order to maximize likes. That addictive dopamine behavior that I like so much on other social services had made its way here as well. It didn’t matter that no one would know on Secret that I was the author, but just knowing that whatever I posted was clever or funny (and other people thought so) got me to post even more things. Why do we create publicly anyway if not to be validated? I wonder if others think the same way. Further, I wonder if others post things just to be provocative and to get hearts. If so, the things you’re posting on Secret then don’t mean the same thing as an honest message, and in some ways takes away from the authenticity. (I’ve noticed incredibly funny people on Twitter tend to do this too: make up stories or anecdotes about someone they saw on the street but it just so happens not to be true. Perhaps it’s the standup comic way of telling a story.)

WUT doesn’t have that problem. Because no one can give you the same kind of feedback, beyond just responding to your message with another linearly, you can’t game the system for such events. Even if you post with the intention of getting a response, there’s no interface to show you and others watching “XX post of yours had NN hearts” (or whatever).

Sometimes, WUT turns into a weird game of telephone. This is especially true of this service over others in its class because there are no threads in WUT: no distinction between posts and comments. Someone will say something, and others will take it and turn it into some rhyme or repeated pattern.

I recently moved WUT up higher in the notifications drawer on iOS. It now sits immediately after Phone and Messages. I thought this was very curious as I’ve never consciously done this for any application ever (even ones I am coding up and testing). I thought about this for a while, and then realized I had to do this: WUT’s primary interface is not in the app, it’s in the Notifications drawer. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever had any app on my phone that used this view space in that way.

WUT messages remind me of early Twitter. In 2006 Twitter, we would post whatever and whenever, free of a filter. It was weird: even though all these posts were public and indexable by the internet, we posted as if only our forty-five followers were ever listening. As we’ve gotten older and more people are listening, we have all come to filter ourselves and to start “creating brands around our identity.”

In more than a few cases, WUT has also become early foursquare: “Sun’s out; in Washington square park. Who’s around?”

Anyway, those are some things I think of when I’m fooling around with these services.

The Top 5 High Fives of National High Five Day … So far!

1. Fancy Five!

2. Family Five!

3. Side Five!

4. Running Start Five!

5. Sigh Five.

Happy National High Five Day!

We made a little something called highfivetheinternet.com so the whole world can create gifs of and share their highest of fives.

Take a five, leave a five.

Ergo dronies

If Kottke says it’s a thing, it must be a thing. As consumer camera drones become more common, this kind of shot (or the one that inspired it by Amit Gupta) will become more familiar. Or this one I made with ominous shadow and a bit of vignette for enhanced drama.

There’s a reason that you’re going to see a lot of these from drone flyers like me, and it’s this: once you get past the novelty of taking a camera high up in the air, getting a bird’s eye view of stuff is actually a little boring.

What birds see is actually a little boring. Humans are interesting. Getting close to stuff is interesting. I bet if we could strap tiny cameras to bird heads, most of what we’d want to look at would happen when they fly close to people. If we could, we’d put cameras on bird heads to take pictures of ourselves.

But try flying your drone close to people. They get freaked out (trust me). Ergo dronies. You want to shoot people, you have to shoot the people you have access to. You end up shooting yourself. It’s not vain, it’s pragmatic.

The next part of the story is the fun part: discovering new things to do with it. New ways to shoot, new shots to get, new moves and new angles. What this feels like to me is that photography was just introduced and enthusiasts are figuring out what a wide shot is and how it feels different from a closeup. Or like the Steadicam was just invented and people are figuring out that running it down a narrow hallway looks really fucking cool.

No more power cable spaghetti!

The Cordito keeps all your cords together and tangle free in a nifty leather wrap.

Keep all your phoneography accessories safe and stylish