   Current Post On Trae’s Blog:
So Meta/Facebook apparently used millions of books to train its AI model without the permission of the authors or publishers. These aren't even books they purchased, but books they illegally downloaded. I've known about this for a few weeks (and apparently the story first broke back in January), but The Atlantic has a tool to see if a book has been stolen.
And lo and behold The Witch and the Rose is in there.
It's honestly frustrating how a major company like this can just blatantly violate copyright law. It's not only copyrighted content, but stolen copyrighted content. We spent the last several decades with major companies going after people for piracy, and a company run by a billionaire can just casually get away with it. And from all reports, this is something Zuckerberg himself authorized.
I am, frankly, deeply frustrated.
Look, I have a nuanced opinion on generative AI. I think there are good applications when its created using ethically sourced training data -- but the fact is literally none of the commercial products out there right now are. People keep trying to use it for everything, and companies keep shoehorning it into every product. But, like, you should not be using ChatGPT to get "answers" to questions because generative AI doesn't actually understand what its saying. Large language models are literally fancy autocomplete, and it can "hallucinate" some wild stuff. You cannot trust anything it produces.
I hate that it's called "AI," because it leads folks to think something deeper is happening behind the scenes. But its not. Image generation is more interesting on a technical level, but again -- none of the image generators available right now are trained on ethically sourced data.
Frankly, generative AI in all of its forms is trained on other people's work, so (what we're pretending is) AI can never truly produce a real work of creativity. It's all derivative schlock. And if we lived in a world where it was built honestly and ethically, it could be useful for things like rapid prototyping and brainstorming.
But we don't live in that world.
So don't use it.
And fuck Meta, Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg for stealing my book.
On April 26th I'm going to be at Concinnity in Milwaukee, WI! Stop on by and say hi if you're in town!
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Is Ruth asexual/aromantic, or is this a joke about a nerd girl we know that everyone asked out and no one ever succeeded? Both?
Both. Mostly the former, but both.
Does Troy Harrington do any voices for that series?
It’s not on his resume. 😛
So what company owns the dubbing rights to this series?
Victory Sunstar has the rights, but they’re currently in bankruptcy.
Magical Soldier Princess Z is a remake of Galaxy Fighter Hiromi, which was a better series, but you kids won’t watch it because it isn’t CGI. At least I was able to replace my Arctic fansubs.
Actually you’re thinking of Magical Starlight Empress Z, which is totally different.
Magic Soldier Princess Z is an obscure series from the late 70s. It was originally released stateside as the bastardized dub “Soldiers of the Sun” (where it got combined with the unrelated series “Lost Whispers” and “Destiny Police” which was weird) in 1982 by Silver Rhythm. Silver Rhythm lost the rights to MSPZ in 2002, when Victory Sunstar snatched it up. Victory Sunstar put out a DVD release in 2004. It didn’t sell well, so it went out of print in 2007 — and with Victory Sunstar’s legal and financial problems there doesn’t appear to be any chance of a rerelease.
(As an odd coda, Silver Rhythm has tried to release a version of Soldiers of the Sun WITHOUT the MSPZ footage… And it doesn’t really work)
And Kelli and Sally were the *worst* names to use for those characters. Ugh! Thank the gods for the mute button.
I just hate Captain/General Rayburn. I mean they made General Yamazaki from Destiny Police an older version of Tanaka from MSPZ. As if it made any sense to combine those two characters to bridge the “generations”
What, did the guy just happen to grow his left arm back somehow?
You know, when I was a kid watching it, it always weirded me out that the character designs changed so drastically. When I found out they weren’t meant to be one cartoon, it made more sense.
My heart rate still doubles when I hear the theme song, though.