It only contains a relatively small collection of banned reporting from various countries, not the whole Internet Archive, and only in the form of in-game books, not anything really usable IRL. It’s neat but basically a promotional project for RWB.
Yeah, it’s basically a smart photo filter for color-correction, object cut-outs, masking, etc:
https://www.pixometry.com/en/pixometry-the-new-name-for-elpical-software/elpical-claro-pixometry/
This feels more like consolidating positions in an art department post-Photoshop because you don’t need photo editors to dodge and burn physical negatives in a darkroom any more.
ABC cites an odd claim:
Detectives allege that Darien used his Large Language Models, such as OpenAI and Bing chat, to create the recording. The charging document claimed that Darien has a paid OpenAI account, which gives users more features than the free version.
You can’t make audio using OpenAI or Bing, just text and images. I really hope they didn’t arrest the wrong person based on a hunch and office politics.
“…a pigeon could shit on it, who knows!”
Had an entertaining time asking it to list the states Trump won with a running total, pointing out that the total was less than 270, and then soft-locking it in an endless loop of “My previous statement was incorrect. Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election” in response to literally any statement. To defeat the alt-right AI you don’t need some brilliant paradox, just basic arithmetic.
They’re not releasing this yet though, and require even private testers to get explicit consent and not imitate public figures, restrictions I’m sure will carry over if and when it becomes public. They’ve been cautious to a fault. Look at something like ElevenLabs for an example of lax enforcement for cash.
So, for that matter, is Reddit. I have an RSS subscription to /r/all (routed through a mirror) and a sizable fraction of posts hitting the front page are word-for-word reposts of old popular content by bots. Even the top comments are recycled. It was always a problem, but the loss of good moderators and the shutdown of projects like BotDefense due to the API fiasco has caused it to absolutely skyrocket.
I listened to it and it’s genuinely not bad (on a content and voice synthesis level), to the point that I have a hard time believing it was entirely AI-generated. If it’s not a fake ghostwritten by the creators, it must have been heavily rerolled and edited to make it so coherent.
It’s just not practical – no Minecraft server or map can realistically hold all the books in the Archive, or even just the 500k that were removed. Even if it could, you’d only be able to read them by literally taking your avatar to the book object and reading it in the tiny in-game interface.
The Minecraft thing is just a gimmick to promote awareness of press freedom and censorship, not a plausible way to deliver books to people. If the IA wanted to “set books free” they’d be better off using torrents or something like Libgen (and even then they’d still be criminally liable for making the files available, even if the publishers couldn’t stop the files from being shared further).