Almost no-one engages with the undercurrent: Isuzu was, in fact, selling not-so-great vehicles. Sort of like LLM-based chatbots† selling not-so-great answers ("if the minimum wasn't good enough, it wouldn't be the minimum"). Nor with the place that most deception takes place: The "Finance Manager, because deception includes intentional omission (especially when disclosure is already required).
- Speaking of deception not just by, but about the ownership and profitability of, LLM-based chatbots, here's an excellent example of "Why can't they both lose?" The lawsuit over whether El0n Mu5k lost billyuns more when OpenAI changed its "charitable" structure has exposed that nobody (or almost nobody) in the industry trusts one of the decisionmakers — and the other one's trustworthiness (or lack thereof) was already, shall we say, in the public domain.
Further, it's not a "charitable structure" when virtually all of "management" is busy becoming multimillionaires with top-1% compensation packages, nor when one initial financier sues because he didn't earn a far-above-market return on his financing package.
- Which is marginally less dishonest than entertainment-industry royalty accounting and practices. And that's in a part of the industry in which end-user sales are "certified" by a third party (which is admittedly impaired by conflicts of interest so severe that even the tobacco industry wouldn't engage in them)… unlike, say, print publishing.
- At least Mr Clinton isn't a (starving) early-career artist… although once upon a time, he was. This exposes the serious logical problem with entertainment-industry compensation for content providers (individually, like authors, or multielement/multirole teams, like cinema): The circular transfer of "greater risk justifies greater reward" in both directions between individual transactions and commercial-segment-wide practices.
- Financially, all of the above represents a self-defeating type of cost-minimization: Don't pay for what you think you can get away with taking for free, because that will only harm someone else. Even when that "someone else" is a party that you rely upon for continuing production of the raw materials of your business model (and even when your business model is excused as "charitable"). I find their lack of payment… disturbing, and at least equally so as to permission.
- Every sausage on this platter results from turning "creativity" into "someone else's profit," whether through participation in the chain from creator to audience — or not, in the present or the past.
Don't worry — now that the fairness hearing has been held, I'll have more substantive comments on the proposed Bartz v. Anthropic settlement. Or, maybe, do worry…
† They're not "artificial intelligence" — not even when the term is modified with "generative" — because they neither exercise independent judgment nor alter their behavior/output in instance n+5 based on being instructed that their behavior/output in instance n was incorrect. That this resembles stereotypical politicians and stereotypical used-car salesmen isn't beside the point; it is the point, because "generative artificial intelligence" is an inherently deceptive term, much like "a chicken in every pot"… or "dealer-applied anticorrosion undercoating."