Shared Article from the Guardian

Authors file a lawsuit against OpenAI for unlawfully â??ingesti…

Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay allege that their books, which are copyrighted, were ‘used to train’ ChatGPT because the chatbot generated ‘very acc…

Ella Creamer @ theguardian.com

The entire principle of copyright, and so-called intellectual property broadly, is and always has been basically obscene, censorious, tyrannical and absurd. But nearly the entire press discussion of generative Artificial Intelligence systems in connection with the arts and literature has been characterized by a really loopy disconnection from anything approaching even the real (if awful) state of copyright law or the principles behind it. This is partly because of the usual computers are magic, this changes everything! thoughtlessness of a great deal of tech journalism. It’s also partly because the entitled holders of copyrights have a really strong tendency, wherever there is someone to indulge their flights of fancy, towards the most ludicrous exercises of copyright maximalism. To be clear, this lawsuit would be bad and absurd enough if it were a normal assertion of copyright against, say, internet book pirates, or an attempt to police the boundaries of what’s allowed as fair use of copyrighted material quoted for a transformative purpose.^[1] But this lawsuit is ludicrous even if taken on copyright’s own terms, even if you stipulate to the whole ridiculous pseudo-propertarian structure of intellectual and literary monopoly rights.

ChatGPT does not copy books. Nobody alleges that it’s producing a copy of anything. The system reads a whole lot of books (as well as a whole lot of other English text) and it analyzes how words are used in them. It uses this to prime a system which is, among other things, good at producing original content in the same language that summarizes those books, reports on them, imitates their style, or what have you, without reproducing the original text. Maybe some authors don’t like that the AI system has read their books. Tough luck; no law of copyright, whatever their other flaws, could be possibly read to imply a unilateral right to forbid people from reading books or from running computerized statistical analyses on their contents. Some copyright holders may be anxious or scared about what the ability of automated systems to create good summaries or reports or stylistic imitations and parodies of their work will imply about their social or economic prospects in the future, or the compensation schemes they have come to depend on. But that doesn’t make their anxieties a concern of copyright law. Copyright law was supposedly about controlling copying, not an open-ended prerogative to forbid, punish or shake down anyone who consumes the works they produce and to demand a veto over who can produces distinct, original summaries or analyses based on their contents. That’s bananas.

1. ^[1]These allowances are usually pretty generous when it comes to literature, insanely cribbed when it comes to audio, video and photographs, and completely, wildly unprincipled and impossible to know for sure ahead of time until the copyright holder attempts to punish you with a copyright hammer.↩

Here’s a bit from Marketplaces Find A Way, a fairly delightful article by M. Nolan Gray in the July 2023 (Adam Smith 300) issue of Reason. The photo discussed in the block quote is up at the top of the article on the web, and laid out on the page in the print edition; so I’ve embedded that here directly by the part of the text that’s talking about it.

Back in the physical world, this indelible urge to truck, barter, and exchange forms the basis of cities. As the urban planner Alain Bertaud has argued, people principally gather to exchange goods, labor, and ideas. This is why cities follow a near-universal pattern of densities peaking around a central business district and declining outward. It’s also why dedicated marketplaces are a near-universal urban design feature, from New York City’s Times Square to Mexico City’s Zócalo to Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar.

It’s ironic, then, that contemporary Anglo-American urban planning is almost completely defined by a phobia of markets.

The streets and sidewalks of American cities were once sites of spontaneous, unplanned marketplaces. As captured by the iconic 1900 photo of New York City’s Mulberry Street in Little Italy, peddlers with pushcarts once set up shop along busy streets selling everything from peanuts to watches—an accessible kind of entrepreneurship that naturally appealed to immigrants. Any public space could turn into a marketplace, if the conditions were right.

This kind of informal market activity was stamped out by corralling sellers into discrete districts, mandating expensive licenses, or banning vendors altogether. Similar fights are underway in cities in regions across the developing world, where a quixotic quest for visual order and a reorientation of the urban public realm around the car has led to similar anti-vendor efforts in Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Likewise, markets once blended naturally into almost every neighborhood, even residential areas. As a trip to New York City’s Tenement Museum reveals, the strict distinction between home and work is an entirely modern invention; historically, front parlors doubled as offices, workshops, restaurants. The same is true of neighborhoods: Even the most humdrum residential neighborhood was once served by corner groceries, barbershops, and bars.

Zoning’s role in perpetuating the housing affordability crisis is well known. But equally pernicious has been the way zoning has excised markets from daily life. This is by design: Early 20th century Anglo-American elites saw the mere presence of market activity as corrupting. Such prejudices turned into zoning codes that strictly segregated land uses, producing a monoculture landscape of strip malls and subdivisions.

In pre-zoning neighborhoods in cities like Washington, D.C., one can still find the remnants of a lost world of neighborhood commerce, if you know where to look.

Markets find a way….

— M. Nolan Gray, Butchers, Brewers, and Bakers Still Thrive in Urban Marketplaces
Reason (July 2023)

Shared Article from Reason.com

Butchers, brewers, and bakers still thrive in urban marketplaces

Adam Smith recognized that man has a natural "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange."

M. Nolan Gray @ reason.com

For some past pull-quotes and extended writing on similar themes around here on the blog, also check out:

Shared Article from Rad Geek People's Daily

“Is shopping a recipe for the city?” (Wade Graham, DREAM CIT…

From a generally very interesting chapter on Idea 6, Malls, in Wade Graham’s Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World (a book on archite…

radgeek.com

Shared Article from Rad Geek People's Daily

Market-Women and the Revolutionary Market-Place (Gold Coast/Ghan…

From C.L.R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977/1982): Chapter 3. The People in 1947. . . . There was yet another social feature of Gold C…

radgeek.com

This was from a while back on the Poetry Foundation’s Audio Poem of the Day podcast. I made a note at the time but didn’t post it. To-day I’m looking over the note, and I know so much the desolation of the airport delay. But as far as the place and the weather goes, now it all feels like a dispatch from some alien land, in an ancient age far beyond the ken of the fathers of the fathers of men.

April Snow

Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway. The world
is in a delay. All the political consultants drinking whiskey keep
their heads down, lifting them only to look at the beautiful scarred
waitress who wears typewriter keys as a necklace. They jingle
when she brings them drinks. Outside the giant plate glass windows
the planes are completely covered in snow, it piles up on the wings.
I feel like a mountain of cell phone chargers. Each of the various
faiths of our various fathers keeps us only partly protected. I don’t
want to talk on the phone to an angel. At night before I go to sleep
I am already dreaming. Of coffee, of ancient generals, of the faces
of statues each of which has the eternal expression of one of my feelings.
I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike
on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water.

— Matthew Zapruder, April Snow
From Come on All You Ghosts (2010)
and Poetry Foundation’s Audio Poem of the Day podcast (1 April 2023)

According to some reports, the Opelika-Auburn News may be halting home delivery of their daily print edition. But don’t for a moment let anyone tell you that they have given up on doing hard-hitting journalism with a global reach.

From the online edition:

Shared Article from Opelika-Auburn News

‘Too much’: Burger King’s new offering in Thailand has no …

Burger King is causing a stir in Thailand with its new offering: a burger with no meat and a jaw-dropping amount of cheese.

Kocha Olarn and Michelle Toh, CNN @ oanow.com