This is an absurd take. The meaning of "selling" is extremely broad, courts have found such language to apply to transactions as simple as providing an http request in exchange for an http response. Their lawyers must have been begging them to remove that language for the liability it represents.
For all purposes actually relevant to privacy, the updated language is more specific and just as strong.
If they were only selling data in such an 'innocent' way, couldn't they clearly state that, in addition to whatever legalese they're required to provide?
That's literally exactly what they do. This is why you should consider reading beyond headlines from time to time.
> You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.
> (from the attached FAQ) Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data”), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
The courts have found providing an http request in exchange for an http response- where both the request and response contains valuable data, is selling data? Well that’s interesting because I too consider it selling of data. I’m glad the courts and I can agree on something so simple and obvious.
> All of these AI outputs are both polluting the commons where they pulled all their training data AND are alienating the creators of these cultural outputs via displacement of labor and payment
No dispute on the first part, but I really wish there were numbers available somehow to address the second. Maybe it's my cultural bubble, but it sure feels like the "AI Artpocalypse" isn't coming, in part because of AI backlash in general, but more specifically because people who are willing to pay money for art seem to strongly prefer that their money goes to an artist, not a GPU cluster operator.
I think a similar idea might be persisting in AI programming as well, even though it seems like such a perfect use case. Anthropic released an internal survey a few weeks ago that was like, the vast majority, something like 90% of their own workers AI usage, was spent explaining allnd learning about things that already exist, or doing little one-off side projects that otherwise wouldn't have happened at all, because of the overhead, like building little dashboards for a single dataset or something, stuff where the outcome isn't worth the effort of doing it yourself. For everything that actually matters and would be paid for, the premier AI coding company is using people to do it.
I guess I'm in a bubble, because it doesn't feel that way to me.
When AI tops the charts (in country music) and digital visual artists have to basically film themselves working to prove that they're actually creating their art, it's already gone pretty far. It feels like the even when people care (and they great mass do not) it creates problems for real artists. Maybe they will shift to some other forms of art that aren't so easily generated, or maybe they'll all just do "clean up" on generated pieces and fake brush sequences. I'd hate for art to become just tracing the outlines of something made by something else.
Of course, one could say the same about photography where the art is entirely in choosing the place, time, and exposure. Even that has taken a hit with believable photorealistic generators. Even if you can detect a generator, it spoils the field and creates suspicion rather than wonder.
> more specifically because people who are willing to pay money for art seem to strongly prefer that their money goes to an artist, not a GPU cluster operator.
Look at furniture. People will pay a premium for handcrafted furniture because it becomes part of the story of the result, even when Ikea offers a basically identical piece (with their various solid-wood items) at a fraction of the price and with a much easier delivery process.
Of course, AI art also has the issue that it's effectively impossible to actually dictate details exactly like you want. I've used it for no-profit hobby things (wargames and tabletop games, for example), and getting exact details for anything (think "fantasy character profile using X extensive list of gear in Y specific visual style") takes extensive experimentation (most of which can't be generalized well since it depends on quirks of individual models and sub-models) and photoshopping different results together. If I were doing it for a paid product, just commissioning art would probably be cheaper overall compared to the person-hours involved.
Yeah but if they, for example use AI to do their design or marketing materials then the public seems to dislike that. But again, no numbers that's just how it feels to me.
After enough time, exposure and improvement of the technology I don’t think the public will know or care. There will be generations born into a world full of AI art who know no better and don’t share the same nostalgia as you or I.
What's hilarious is that, for years, the enterprise shied away from open source due to the legal considerations they were concerned about. But now... With AI, even though everyone knows that copyright material was stolen by every frontier provider, the enterprise is now like: stolen copyright that can potentially allow me to get rid of some pesky employees? Sign us up!
Yup, there's this angle that's been a 180, but I'm referring to the fact that the US Copyright Office determined that AI output isn't anyone's IP.
Which in itself is an absurdity, where the culmination of the world's copyrighted content is compiled and used to then spit out content that somehow belongs to no one.
I think most businesses using AI illustrations are not expecting to copyright the images themselves. The logos and words that are put on top of the AI image are the important bits to have trademarked/copyrighted.
I guess I'm looking at it from a software perspective, where code itself is the magic IP/capital/whatever that's crucial to the business, and replacing it with non-IP anyone can copy/use/sell would be a liability and weird choice.
Art is political more than it is technical. People like Banksy’s art because it’s Banksy, not because he creates accurate images of policemen and girls with balloons.
I think "cultural" is a better word there than "political."
But Banksy wasn't originally Banksy.
I would imagine that you'll see some new heavily-AI-using artists pop up and become name brands in the next decade. (One wildcard here could be if the super-wealthy art-speculation bubble ever pops.)
Flickr, etc, didn't stop new photographers from having exhibitions and being part of the regular "art world" so I expect the easy availability of slop-level generated images similarly won't change that some people will do it in a way that makes them in-demand and popular at the high end.
At the low-to-medium end there are already very few "working artists" because of a steady decline after the spread of recorded media.
Advertising is an area where working artists will be hit hard but is also a field where the "serious" art world generally doesn't consider it art in the first place.
Not often discussed is the digital nature of this all as well. An LLM isn't going to scale a building to illegally paint a wall. One because it can't, but two because the people interested in performance art like that are not bound by corporate. Most of this push for AI art is going to come from commercial entities doing low effort digital stuff for money not craft.
Musicians will keep playing live, artists will keep selling real paintings, sculptors will keep doing real sculptures etc.
The internet is going to suffer significantly for the reasons you point out. But the human aspect of art is such a huge component of creative endeavours, the final output is sometimes only a small part of it.
Mentioning people like Banksy at all is missing the point though. It makes it sound like art is about going to museums and seeing pieces (or going to non-museums where people like Banksy made a thing). I feel like, particularly in tech circles, people don’t recognize that the music, movies and TV shows they consume are also art, and that the millions of people who make those things are very legitimately threatened by this stuff.
If it were just about “the next Banksy” it would be less of a big deal. Many actors, visual artists, technical artists, etc make their living doing stock image/video and commercials so they can afford rent while keeping their skills sharp enough to do the work they really believe in (which is often unpaid or underpaid). Stock media companies and ad agencies are going to start pumping out AI content as soon as it looks passable for their uses (Coca Cola just did this with their yearly Christmas ad). Suddenly the cinematographers who can only afford a camera if it helps pay the bills shooting commercials can’t anymore.
Entire pathways to getting into arts and entertainment are drying up, and by the time the mainstream understands that it may be too late, and movie studios will be going “we can’t find any new actors or crew people. Huh. I guess it’s time to replace our people with AI too, we have no choice!”
I’d say in this context that politics concerns stated preferences, while culture labels the revealed preferences. Also makes the statement «culture eats policy for breakfast» make more sense now that I’ve thought about it this way.
I'd distinguish between physical art and digital art tbh. Physical art has already grappled with being automated away with the advent of photography, but people still buy physical art because they like the physical medium and want to support the creator. Digital art (for one off needs), however, is a trickier place since I think that's where AI is displacing. It's not making masterpieces, but if someone wanted a picture of a dwarf for a D&D campaign, they'd probably generate it instead of contracting it out.
Right, but the question then is, would it actually have been contracted out?
I've played RPGs, I know how this works: you either Google image search for a character you like and copy/paste and illegally print it, or you just leave that part of the sheet blank.
So it's analogous to the "make a one-off dashboard" type uses from that programming survey: the work that's being done with AI is work that otherwise wouldn't have been done at all.
That is true for all media purchases since the invention of copyright in 1662.
You think you own the Silmarillion because you have a paper copy? Hah! No, you have a transferrable license to read it.
Every hard copy movie you have starts with a big green FBI warning reminding you that having that disc does not means you own the movie, it means you have a transferrable license to play it for yourself and small groups on small screens.
Digital media with DRM allow content distributors to remove the "transferrable" part of the license if they want, which often allows them to sell for cheaper since they know that each sale represents only one person recieving the experience. The license comes with less rights (no transferrance), so it can be priced lower.
Only drm free steam games. The ones with the steam drm require steam client to be running to launch (steam itself can be in offline mode but it still needs to be running)
Games using things like steam input might also require steam to be running so there is some drm free games that might not run also. Some of those will if you move them outside the steam folder / rename Steam.exe. If you leave them in the steam folder the game will start steam for you if when you launch it.
Xbox One/PS4 is when both sides standardized on BluRay.
When Xbox360 and PS3 came out, the format war was only just starting, and the consoles were on either side of it.
PS3 came with a BluRay drive and the games were delivered on BluRay.
Xbox360 came with software support for HDDVD, but the actual disk reader hardware was a DVD reader (famously, a large off-the-shelf part selected at the last minute that required a redesign of the cooling system to accomodate its size), and the HDDVD drive was an optional add-on that nobody bought.
The fact that every PS3 could read BluRay, but you needed a special extra to play HDDVD on Xbox 360 is arguably the main reason BluRay won the format war.
Which is probably why Microsoft decided to focus so much on media features for the Xbone. What they should have considered was that they had won the Xbox 360 generation by being a better game platform; it should really be no skin off Microsoft’s back that Blu-Ray won the format war.
This title is misleading. The article doesn't say that the chat history will be used as evidence, only that it exists. Whether it can be used in court is an unsettled question, as explained in the last few paragraphs.
Another thread says they tried to use his past "drawing a fire related photo" to try and paint him as some kind of pyromaniac. These clods just cant help themselves but to prove AT THE FIRST CHANCE that they will twist and abuse anything they can get their hands on to paint some kind of picture. Its hilarious that they cant even keep this in their back pockets to wait for a real real bad hard to persecute criminal to use it on either
it's like not speaking to the police - but it's everything you have ever said/asked for in your life outside of talking to yourself in the shower. or at least it's getting there.
a lot of people, especially younger ones, seem to use chatgpt as a neutral third party in every important decision. so it probably has more extensive records on their thoughts than social media ever did. in fact, people often curate their Instagram feeds - but chatgpt has their unfiltered thoughts.
Judges can refuse to admit anything they want, or give jurors instructions of any kind about how to consider evidence in relation to a crime. About the only thing a judge can't do is fabricate evidence themselves.
Yes, you are right. The OP has a weirdly narrow definition of what RAG is.
Only the most basic "hello world" type RAG systems rely exclusively on vector search. Everybody has been doing hybrid search or multiple simultaneous searches exposed through tools for quite some time now.
How are they niche? The default mode of search for most dedicated RAG apps nowadays is hybrid search that blends classical BM-25 search with some HNSW embedding search. That's already breaking the definition.
A search is a search. The architecture doesn't care if it's doing an vector search or a text search or a keyword search or a regex search, it's all the same. Deploying a RAG app means trying different search methods, or using multiple methods simultaneously or sequentially, to get the best performance for your corpus and use case.
Most hybrid stacks (BM25 + dense via HNSW/IVF) still rely on embeddings as a first class signal. So in practice the vector side carries recall on paraphrase/synonymy/OOO vocab, while BM25 stabilizes precision on exact term and short doc cases. So my point still stands.
> The architecture doesn't care
The architecture does care because latency, recall shape, and failure modes differ.
I don't know of any serious RAG deployments that don't use vectors. I'm referring to large scale systems, not hobby projects or small sites.
Chunking is still relevant, because you want your tool calls to return results specific to the needs of the query.
If you want to know "how are tartans officially registered" you don't want to feed the entire 554kb wikipedia article on Tartan to your model, using 138,500 tokens, over 35% of gpt-5's context window, with significant monetary and latency cost. You want to feed it just the "Regulation>Registration" subsection and get an answer 1000x cheaper and faster.
but you could. For that example, you could just use a much cheaper model since it's not that complicated a question, and just pass the entire article. Just use gemini flash for example. Models will only get cheaper and context windows only get bigger
That's a silly distinction to make, because there's nothing stopping you from giving an agent access to a semantic search.
If I make a semantic search over my organization's Policy As Code procedures or whatever and give it to Claude Code as an MCP, does Claude Code suddenly stop being agentic?
For all purposes actually relevant to privacy, the updated language is more specific and just as strong.