ABOUT THIS REPORT

This Report by the U.S. Copyright Office addresses the legal and policy issues related to artificial intelligence (“AI”) and copyright, as outlined in the Office’s August 2023 Notice of Inquiry (“NOI”).

The Report will be published in several Parts, each one addressing a different topic. This Part addresses the copyrightability of works created using generative AI. The first Part, published in 2024, addresses the topic of digital replicas—the use of digital technology to realistically replicate an individual’s voice or appearance. A subsequent part will turn to the training of AI models on copyrighted works, licensing considerations, and allocation of any liability. To learn more, visit www.copyright.gov/ai.

Emphasis mine. So, probably have to wait for Part 3 or 4 or whatever.

Here’s the bullet point summary of findings from page iii for anyone who doesn’t want to go digging through the PDF:

Based on an analysis of copyright law and policy, informed by the many thoughtful comments in response to our NOI, the Office makes the following conclusions and recommendations:

• Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change.
• The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output.
• Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material.
• Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.
• Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
• Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control.
• Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs.
• The case has not been made for additional copyright or sui generis protection for AI- generated content.

The Office will continue to monitor technological and legal developments to determine whether any of these conclusions should be revisited. It will also provide ongoing assistance to the public, including through additional registration guidance and an update to the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices.

Everything I’ve set in Settings is forgotten: Default Listing reverts to All, Default Post Sort reverts to Hot, and so on.

mlmym (the “old” interface) stores its front-end specific settings in your browser via cookies and local storage. The way it’s implemented works for the most part and probably makes the front-end simpler, but has some downsides like not retaining your choices between logins. There’s an issue open for this in the bug tracker: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym/issues/104

I’m not sure why it forces a logout periodically even when you’re using it regularly though. (I mean, the cookies are probably not being updated and just expire eventually – but I don’t know if that was a deliberate choice or not.) It might be a good idea to open an issue for this?

kbin.social has been totally down for a while. I don’t think your posts are actually federating when you post into a kbin.social magazine right now; the votes you are getting are probably from other lemmy.world users only.

[…] male-gazey content. I am 2) a woman extremely disinterested in that.

I feel some men might also not want to see content focused on games where a big goal is to romance a man as a woman, presented in a femgazey way or a way tailored to our desires even if not sexualized.

Fair enough. There are a lot of eroge where you play as a women that are absolutely, clearly intended to be played by men though; that part alone isn’t likely to be off-putting, but I can see specific presentation and femgaze heavy works being just as off putting to some guys as malegaze heavy works are to some women. If the audience is mostly straight guys, posting fan art of something like an explicit BL work probably isn’t going to get much positive response, I suppose. :-)

There’s so little content posted regularly in the visualnovels community though that I feel like anyone actively trying to start discussions there on the subject of VNs would likely be welcomed, but I might be wrong about that. The most successful posts I’ve seen are generally notices about sales and some business news with people occasionally posting memes and such as well.

If that doesn’t feel right to you though, I get it, and hopefully reviving the other community works out.

Is the issue that the posts will be frequently inaccessible?

I don’t think your posts are federating out at all when kbin.social is down – basically only people on your own instance can see it, if I understand how federation works correctly. If you check the view of the community from lemmy.world the last post visible is from a month ago, for example – https://lemmy.world/c/Otomegames@kbin.social?dataType=Post&sort=New – even though I can see on your instance that you’ve started several threads since then. I can’t even load the community from reddthat since it was probably never requested and kbin.social is down currently; it just errors out.

Does Lemmy have a way to get inactive mods removed and replaced?

I don’t know. Tagging @Blaze@reddthat.com for suggestions since they’ve been trying to grow the Fediverse for a while and may know how to go about it, if it’s possible.

kbin.social’s been down for a while, and having serious problems for months.

There is a general visual novel community at !visualnovels@lemmy.comfysnug.space which might be a better place to post to. It’s not very active, but I know there are at least a few people around paying attention to it. I might chime in on some threads occasionally if you post there. My tastes are more in line with VNs aimed at the straight-male demographic, but I’m willing to try other VNs beyond that if there is a really good story or novel mechanics or some other non-sexual factor that makes it interesting.

If that community doesn’t fit your needs, I think there is also !otome_games@lemmy.world – but it seemed completely dead the last time I looked. You might be able to revive it though if you want to try.

I was curious, so I did some searches on this topic for you and found these pages:

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18155134
• http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/practical-python-porting/

The second link in particular notes:

The reason that things are much easier with all ASCII data is that practically every Unicode encoding in existence maps bytes 0x00…0x7f to the corresponding code points, so byte strings and Unicode strings that contain the same all-ASCII data are basically equivalent, even semantically. What usually trips people up with non-ASCII data is that the semantic meaning of bytes in the range 0x80…0xff changes from one encoding to another.

But, thinking like a systems programmer again, for many purposes the semantic meaning of bytes 0x80…0xff doesn’t matter. All that matters is that those bytes are preserved unchanged by whatever operations are done. Typical operations like tokenizing strings, looking for markers indicating particular types of data, etc. only need to care about the meaning of bytes in the range 0x00…0x7f; bytes in the range 0x80…0xff are just along for the ride.

So the trick for beating Python 3 strings into submission is to put in encoding and decoding calls where you need to, choosing a single-byte encoding that doesn’t mutate 0x80…0xff. There are many of these; most of the Latin-{1…6} sequence (aka ISO-8859-1…10) is has this property. What you do not want to do is pick utf-8 or any of the multibyte Asian encodings. Latin-1 will do fine; in fact it has an advantage over the others in memory consumption, which we’ll describe below.

Whether depending on this is actually correct or not is beyond me, but it seems like people have actually been using that pass-through behavior in practice and put it into things like Python2 -> 3 migration guides.

The first link suggests that the seemingly undefined ranges are valid as C0 and C1 control codes which may be why it doesn’t throw errors.

Or is there a website where you can download OpenStreetMap as a PDF.

Have you taken a look at this wiki page yet?

Depending on what you need one of the suggestions there may be helpful.

There is also documentation about PBF files as used by OSM if you want to do something more unusual that needs custom coding.

IIRC, Mozilla doesn’t ship Firefox with DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) enabled by default in most countries – and I think it only does Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) if DoH is enabled.

From LibreWolf’s website:

By default DoH is not enabled in LibreWolf.

I assume that also disables ECH by default.

Is this for game consoles only, or would stuff like experimenting with similar looking (low-poly) art techniques on modern computers be acceptable there as well?

I don’t know how to do it with KDE’s tools, but on the command line with ffmpeg you can do something like this:

ffmpeg -i video_track.mp4 -i audio_jp.m4a -i audio_en.m4a -map 0:v -map 1:a -map 2:a -metadata:s:a:0 language=jpn -metadata:s:a:1 language=eng -c:v copy -c:a copy output.mp4

Breaking it down, it:

• runs ffmpeg
• with three inputs (-i flag) – a video file, and two audio files.
• The streams are explicitly mapped into the result, counting the inputs from 0 – i.e. -map 0:v maps input 0 (the first file) as video (v) to the output file and -map 1:a maps the next input as audio (a), etc.
• It sets the metadata for the audio tracks -metadata:s:a:0 language=jpn sets the first audio track (again counting from 0…) to Japanese; the second metadata option sets the next audio track to English.
• -c:v copy specifies that the video codec should be copied directly (i.e. don’t re-encode – remove this if you DO need to re-encode)
• -c:a copy specifies that the audio codec should be copied directly (i.e. don’t re-encode – remove this if you DO need to re-encode)
• output.mp4 – finally, list the name of the file you want the result written into.

See documentation here: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html

If you need another language in the future, I think the language abbreviations are the three letter codes from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-2_codes – but I’m not certain on that.

I wonder if this will actually cause an increase in the number of security vulnerabilities and breaches as there’s now a fairly obvious way for employees to penalize their bosses financially for being assholes…

I might be interested from the audience side depending on the specific content that gets posted. I like Let’s Plays – particularly blind runs.

My old username from reddit and HN was already taken and I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to be called so I just picked some random characters like this:

>>> import random
>>> ''.join([random.choice("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789") for x in range(5)])
'e0qdk'

I have that literally in my kbin profile, but it’s not on my reddthat one. (I think I tried to copy it there originally when I set up the account but ran into some issue with Lemmy’s UI – been long enough that I forget what exactly.)

I spent a while looking thanks to your post and only found stuff from 2022 as well. My Chinese is basically non-existent though. (I can pick out a word here and there from knowing some Japanese, but that’s about it.) Someone who knows Chinese might have better luck digging.

I did find this file from 2022 (14999x6982 – ⚠️ 100+ MB PNG): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/The_geologic_map_of_the_Moon_at_1-2.5M_scale.png

Associated information (and preview): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_geologic_map_of_the_Moon_at_1-2.5M_scale.png

I assume that’s the one you’re referring to from 2022?

All the news stories just have low-res previews.

Is there a preview that looks different from this? I don’t see a preview at all (just a picture of people at some sort of presentation) in your link – but my browser might just not be loading it if there is one. (I generally block scripts.)

Edit: tweaked wording slightly

I think this is just using SpeechDispatcher from the system – so it’s not a Firefox specific thing. I get a similar (but very slightly different) voice on my own system by default – which matches what I get when I run a command like spd-say --wait "Hello world" from the command line.

I’m pretty sure SpeechDispatcher can be configured to use a different synthesis engine – Arch’s wiki has some suggestions: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Speech_dispatcher – but I haven’t dug into it yet.

you might check out Trackless if you like interactive fiction

Thanks. I’ll check it out.

BTW, I thought of another game that might be of interest to you. Have you seen Not for Broadcast? It’s an unusual game where you play as the controller in the studio switching between multiple video feeds of actual actors presenting the news on TV. You get to make choices about what to show, what to cut, and what ads to play in your broadcast – which affects the world in an exaggerated fashion. The game timeskips to show you how things play out over the years. There’s some distractions that make it a bit more gamey than a VN but you can turn most of them off if they’re too annoying, I think.

Have you explored text adventures / interactive fiction? They’re even more niche than VNs but there’s some good ones out there. I remember liking Worlds Apart back when I played it. (15+ years ago… o___o)

One of these days I should go dig back into them again.

Maybe you’d be interested in “kinetic novels”? They’re basically VNs without choices.

I think the term would be “necrobump”

That’s from old school forums where posting to a thread bumped it back to the top of the feed and thus thrust old info prominently into everyone’s view again. You won’t get that same bump effect with most sorts on Lemmy. (“New comments” sort might work like that though? I’m not sure exactly how that’s handled.)

otherwise everyone has moved on

It’s pretty rare to get much of a response even after just 24 hours or so – not just in terms of comments, but even for upvotes. I think after that point, posts are usually so far down people’s feeds that almost no one sees it any more. That probably also discourages most people from replying since basically no one will see it. (Maybe the poster of the thread or comment you’re replying to will see it, but probably almost no one else will if it’s more than a day or so old.)

Some people do dig through community archives and/or user profiles – particularly after a new thread is posted – and they’ll occasionally upvote old posts, but they very rarely comment.