The kid who used AI to cheat on an AP project was dumb.

The parents who tried to sue the school over it are dumber:

A federal court yesterday ruled against parents who sued a Massachusetts school district for punishing their son who used an artificial intelligence tool to complete an assignment.

Dale and Jennifer Harris sued Hingham High School officials and the School Committee and sought a preliminary injunction requiring the school to change their son’s grade and expunge the incident from his disciplinary record before he needs to submit college applications. The parents argued that there was no rule against using AI in the student handbook, but school officials said the student violated multiple policies.

The Harris’ motion for an injunction was rejected in an order issued yesterday from US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. US Magistrate Judge Paul Levenson found that school officials “have the better of the argument on both the facts and the law.”

Continue reading The kid who used AI to cheat on an AP project was dumb.

ACX will let audiobook narrators scrape their own voice for AI narration.

ACX/Audible is also going to be continuing to mainstream their AI narration ‘services’ generally, but this is what caught my eye: “ACX’s new AI tool will allow voice narrators to replicate their own voice.” Translating some of the PR-speak on the fly, ACX will take a maybe-representative sample of the narrators’ voices, recreate it in hopefully an accurate fashion, and presumably pay a smaller royalty to the narrators to “reflect the work involved in creating and managing voice replica productions.”

Continue reading ACX will let audiobook narrators scrape their own voice for AI narration.

Art pieces that use AI in the process have a ‘look.’ One not unlike the Mark of Cain.

It doesn’t matter how much you do yourself. You could draw the whole thing by hand – but once you start using Stable Diffusion or whatever, the program overwhelms the actual art. You invariably end up with generic popslop, and I frankly don’t know why you bothered to do any original work at all.

God, art historians are going to end up hating this decade.

Moe Lane

PS: My books’ cover art is AI-free. I won’t use an artist who uses it.

#commissionearned

Tweet of the Day, NaNoWriMo Continues To Spiral Inward edition.

My relationship with NaNoWriMo has always been at arm’s-length. Every November, I sit down and try to get at least fifty thousand words out, because it’s great for getting me that crucial first draft. But I never got into that entire world. Good instincts, I suppose.

Continue reading Tweet of the Day, NaNoWriMo Continues To Spiral Inward edition.

Tweet of the Day, GIGOGOGOG@#$%!@#$!@ edition.

I’m surprised anybody’s surprised. I mean, isn’t this intuitive? AI prompt results don’t have conscious decisions behind them; the model just does a high-probability guess, based on the existing information in its database. Dump enough AI prompt results into the database, and the amount of actual information goes down. Eventually it collapses, and you get a smear of fuzzy junk.

This seems pretty straightforward, yes?

Via @Strangeland_Elf.

Tweet of the Day, They Sent Lawyers, Guns, And Money edition.

And, indeed, the ordure is about to hit the winnowing blade.

Via @KateDrawsComics, and more here. Note, however, that this case involves musical catalogues, and that Sony, Universal, and Warner are no doubt willing to negotiate a payoff (and licensing fees). Does that make this a pointless lawsuit? …Not really, because it’ll establish that ‘fair use’ does not extend this far. And that will help immensely with all the other anti-AI lawsuits out there.

Tweet of the Day, When You Should NOT Seek Forgiveness Instead Of Permission edition.

To wit: when the person you’re trying to impose on can afford a metric [expletive deleted]ton of vicious attack lawyers. (Via @IMAO_)

One hopes that this is not the end of the matter.

In case it ever comes up: do not use AI to write legal briefs.

It will cause you to double lose your cases – which is to say, you’ll first lose on the merits, and then you’ll get fined by the court for being a natural born damned fool.

Continue reading In case it ever comes up: do not use AI to write legal briefs.