Please review HiQ vs. LinkedIn - it hinged on the fact that HiQ hired crowdsourced workers (“turkers”) to create fake profiles through which to access LinkedIn’s platform (who had to agree to the ToS to create these accounts). The court found that hiQ expressly agreed to the user agreement when it created its corporate account on LinkedIn’s platform.
This doesn't apply if you don't ever agree to anything - which is the case if the information is not locked behind account creation.
> it is considered theft-of-service if you bypass the posted site usage terms
My understanding is that this is not accurate.
HiQ v LinkedIn established that this is only the case if you actually agreed to the terms of service. Such "agreement" only happens if the information is walled behind an account creation process, e.g. Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc. If it's just scraping publicly available webpages, the only legal issue with scraping would be unreasonably or obviously negligent scraping practices which lead to degradation or denial-of-service. And obviously the line for that would have to be determined in civil court.
eBay v. Bidder's Edge (2000) is the last case that I could find which even considered violation of robots.txt as very minor part of the judgement, but the findings were based far more on other things. Intel Corp. v. Hamidi also implicitly overruled the judgement in that that ruling (though not related to robots.txt, which was really just a very minor point in the first place).
Robots.txt doesnt create a legal obligation. It’s just a set of rules saying “if you don’t follow these rules to politely crawl our site, we’ll block you from crawling our site”.
Obviously “anything goes” in civil suits however - if someone is being absurdly egregious with their crawling there’s usually some exposure to one tort or another.
Bank: "No, you see it was your identity that they stole!"
Customer: "Well I don't know because I seem to have my identity whereas you seem to have lost several thousands of dollars. I'm not clear why you think it's my identity that was stolen rather than your money."
Yes*. At least for the purposes of understanding what the implementations of "AI safety" are most likely to entail. I think that's a very good cognitive model which will lead to high fidelity predictions.
*But to be slightly more charitable, I genuinely think Stability AI / OpenAI / Meta / Google / MidJourney believe that there is significant overlap in the set of protections which are safe for the company, safe for users, and safe for society in a broad sense. But I don't think any released/deployed AI product focuses on the latter two, just the first one.
Examples include:
Society + Company: Depictions of Muhammad could result in small but historically significant moments of civil strife/discord.
Individual + Company: Accidentally generating NSFW content at work could be harmful to a user. Sometimes your prompt won't seem like it would generate NSFW content, but could be adjacent enough: e.g. "I need some art in the style of a 2000's R&B album cover" (See: Sade - Love Deluxe, Monica - Makings of Me, Rihanna - Unapologetic, Janet Jackson - Damita Jo)
Society + Company: Preventing the product from being used for fraud. e.g. CAPTCHA solving, fraudulent documentation, etc.
Individual + Company: Preventing generation of child porn. In the USA, this would likely be illegal both for the user and for the company.
I'm not part of Stability AI but I can take a stab at this:
> explain like I have ~~Asperger (ELIA?)~~ limited understanding of how the world really works.
The AI is being limited so that it cannot produce any "offensive" content which could end up on the news or go viral and bring negative publicity to Stability AI.
Viral posts containing generated content that brings negative publicity to Stability AI are fine as long as they're not "offensive". For example, wrong number of fingers is fine.
There is not a comprehensive, definitive list of things that are "offensive". Many of them we are aware of - e.g. nudity, child porn, depictions of Muhammad. But for many things it cannot be known a priori whether the current zeitgeist will find it offensive or not (e.g. certain depictions of current political figures, like Trump).
Perhaps they will use AI to help decide what might be offensive if it does not explicitly appear on the blocklist. They will definitely keep updating the "AI Safety" to cover additional offensive edge cases.
It's important to note that "AI Safety", as defined above (cannot produce any "offensive" content which could end up on the news or go viral and bring negative publicity to Stability AI) is not just about facially offensive content, but also about offensive uses for milquetoast content. Stability AI won't want news articles detailing how they're used by fraudsters, for example. So there will be some guards on generating things that look like scans of official documents, etc.
When you say "as one of the signers" do you mean you signed the federal bill which modified this tax? i.e. you are a congressperson? Surely I'm misunderstanding you; your post history is utterly incompatible with any sitting congressperson. But I can't figure out what you meant by it.
Loan example doesn't work because it's not revenue used to buy the lathe. That type of loan situation is exactly what depreciation/amortization/MACRS is for. If the company brings in $500,000 but buys a $1,000,000 lathe with a loan, they have a net cash flow of +$500,000. Their NPV isn't immediately affected by the loan liability because it's offset by the positive value of the lathe asset.
Then they pay taxes on $357,100 of adjusted earnings because under a 7-year MACRS depreciation, it's assumed the lathe lost $142,900 of value in its first year of ownership (under double-declining or straight-line methods).
Your first part is accurate though.
Anyways, this tax law is fucking terrible. W2 Wages should not be capital expenses because you generally won't be using loans to pay them.
This doesn't apply if you don't ever agree to anything - which is the case if the information is not locked behind account creation.