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1

Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« Last post by Jubal on Today at 03:24:57 PM »

Colossus

2

Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« Last post by Rob_Haines on Today at 02:47:16 PM »

Stone

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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« Last post by Jubal on Today at 02:04:00 PM »

Cap

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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« Last post by Tusky on Today at 07:44:49 AM »

Lens

5

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Urban wildlife and adaptations

« Last post by Jubal on May 31, 2024, 08:51:44 PM »

Not sure this is a yay so it's not fetting into that thread, but it's fascinating: BBC article today on how New York City's wildlife is mutating and changing due to its urban isolation and changed diet.



I think the bit that most fascinated me was the mention of this paper, which suggests that the NYC population of white-footed mice is getting long term evolutionary change to their digestion to better cope with higher fat and sugar intake in their diets, as a result of them eating far more human-food leftovers. I don't think I'd realised that this sort of change was big enough in mammals to be measurable over the sort of span of time that New York has been urbanised.

6

Active Legislation / Re: MOTION: AI Content Policy PASSED 5-0-1

« Last post by Jubal on May 31, 2024, 04:26:48 PM »

This motion has been amended by a separate motion of the Plaza, carried six votes to zero with two abstentions, which contained the following additions:

a) An addition to section 1, "The plaza recognises" as follows:
1.7 That generative AI is being marketed as a potential solution to many challenges in creative projects, and in certain cases creators may adopt and use it without fully understanding its operation or associated problems.

b) A modification to 3.5:
The substitution of the word “clearly” with “are known to”.

c) An extra clause:
3.8 That 3.5 can be waived for projects which have used AI generated content in the past but have since removed or replaced it. These may be reviewed on a case-by-case basis.

d) Another extra clause:
3.11 Exilian shall not publicly encourage or signpost users to generative AI which does not meet the stipulations in 3.7 as a solution to ongoing challenges in their projects, and shall endeavour to improve support and accessibility for alternative sources of creative material.

A copy of the rules before the amending motion was carried can be found in spoiler tags below:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1. The plaza recognises:

• That images, text, video, and other media produced by large generative adversarial models, more commonly known as "AI" and hereafter referred to as generative AI, are increasingly present in the fields of writing, academia, game design, and other creative and intellectual efforts.
• That media produced by such models are potentially injurious to small and hobbyist creators, whose work may be scraped and partially replicated by such models without their permission.
• That the potentially very rapid generation of such media may risk drowning out or obfuscating discussion of small-scale creative activities by flooding information infrastructure with automatically generated content.
• That the legal status of generated works is still unclear, especially where large models have been trained on significant bodies of copyrighted works.
• That other impacts of using generative AI content may have wider societal harms, including but not limited to the high environmental costs of server infrastructure, the misinformation potential of generative AI information summaries, and the replication of existing biases through generative AI.
• That owing to the nature of this content and the potential for partial use, it may not always be possible to determine whether generative AI has been used in a given project or situation, and that mechanisms for making such a determination may themselves be flawed or biased.

2. The plaza believes:

• That as an organisation we exist to promote and support creators, and should take measures to avoid the promotion of systems that may be injurious to artists, writers and musicians in our community.
• That retaining a cautious approach to potential legal risks around copyright is sensible to ensure the continued functioning of Exilian.
• That it is nonetheless important to retain capacity for open discussion and exploration of new technologies.

3. The plaza resolves:

• That retaining free expression and speech are important, and therefore discussion of, and limited posting of, AI generated content is broadly acceptable on Exilian, especially for discursive and exploratory reasons.
• That the use of AI generated content should be disclosed, and that if an intentional failure to make such a disclosure occurs then the material may be removed and the action of posting it treated as a form of spam under Exilian's Terms of Service.
• That excessive posting of generative AI content, for example primarily posting model-generated posts or posting projects where a large percentage of the art or writing is explicitly generative AI driven, may be treated as a form of spam under Exilian's Terms of Service.
• That any generative AI content posted must not be used to mimic the work of specific writers or artists, or the look of real individuals: such content should be removed to avoid legal challenge, and may be considered under the piracy clause of the Terms of Service.
• That Exilian's newsletters and social media should avoid the promotion of generative AI and any projects that clearly incorporate it.
• That Exilian's competitions and events should have in future explicit rules against the submission of generative AI works.
• That the above clauses 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 may be waived if the model used is both open source and can be shown to have been entirely trained on public domain/CC-0 material or material where the model's producer is the creator and copyright holder.
• That Exilian will comply with legal obligations regarding generative AI content, and that such content may be removed at any time if the administrators have reason to believe that it poses any legal risk to the functioning of Exilian.
• That Exilian will attempt to take any reasonable measures to prevent data scraping of users' content for AI purposes, and that such data scraping will be treated as in violation of Exilian's terms of service, but that Exilian remains a public website run by volunteers and as such cannot provide guarantees that such scraping will be blocked in all cases or legal support in cases where scraping may have taken place.

7

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: World Politics and Elections 2024

« Last post by Jubal on May 31, 2024, 03:49:37 PM »

So, it looks pretty clear that the ANC has lost its parliamentary majority in South Africa for almost the first time in my lifetime (the first democratic election was about two months after I was born so technically the National Party still had its "majority" of the Apartheid white electorate at that point). The biggest shift seems to be that the new MK party of former president Jacob Zuma topped the vote in KwaZulu-Natal, almost entirely at the ANC's expense, and thus coming third in the election and knocking the ANC's vote from the mid fifties to mid forties percent.

I don't get the impression that an anti-ANC coalition is possible: the EFF and MK are far further from the DA than the ANC is from either. If there's a formal agreement my tentative expectation would be that the DA and ANC will form a grand coalition or at least a supply and confidence deal. The ANC, on the basis of these results, don't need to feel too threatened by the DA who haven't really pushed forward out of their heartland (and their white/mixed-race voter demographic). The ANC would need fewer policy concessions to deal with the MKs but there's probably too much personal bad blood there, and the EFF are probably too radical and are also a mistrusted ANC offshoot.

8

General Chatter - The Boozer / Re: Going to be Away?

« Last post by Jubal on May 31, 2024, 02:09:17 PM »

Ah, excellent

I'm meanwhile going to be away from Sunday onwards: I'll be in the UK for my sister's wedding the following weekend, and then returning to Vienna on the 12th.

9

Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« Last post by Jubal on May 31, 2024, 12:39:17 AM »

microscope

10

Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« Last post by Glaurung on May 31, 2024, 12:23:26 AM »

electron