The question is typically described as “the historicity of Jesus”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus

There are similar debates for other famous ancient figures.

The general academic consensus on Jesus (and many similar figures) is that they did exist and many of the details have been fictionalized.

FOIA requests generally don’t involve hackers or leaks. The act exists because citizens insisted that government provides visibility into its inner workings.

What is the equivalent for Google, or any other private company?

It’s hard to draw meaningful conclusions form a single 4 year period. There have been several instances of corruption (and significant externalized costs) in private firms that went on for much longer than 4 years.

I agree that there is a lot of corruption in government but there’s a long gap between that and no accountability. We see various forms of government accountability on a regular basis; politicians lose elections, they get recalled, and they sometimes even get incarcerated. We also have multiple systems designed to allow any citizen to influence government.

None of these systems and safeguards are anywhere close to perfect but it must be better than organizations that don’t even have these systems in the first place.

What makes governments any more susceptible to corruption than a private organization?

I’m not actually talking about governments having absolute control. That’s a pretty extreme scenario to jump to from from the question of if it’s better for a private company or a government to control search.

Right now we think Google is misusing that data. We can’t even get information on it without a leak. The government has a flawed FOIA system but Google has nothing of the sort. The only way we’re protected from corruption at Google (and historically speaking several other large private organization) is when the government steps in and stops them.

Governments often handle corruption poorly but I can rattle of many cases where governments managed to reduce corruption on their own (ie without requiring a revolution). In many cases the source of that corruption was large private organizations.

It would depend on how well we can control it.

Ideally the material would be completely nonreactive for as long as you’re using it and then instantly degrade into component elements.

The faster things degrade, the higher the chance that they’ll degrade when you don’t want it to.

Why is that better? It may not be ideal but governments have at least some accountability.

They could have left out, “for LGBTQ+ people” and it would have been just as accurate.

It’s true. Hamas is posting rookie numbers. They’ve got to up their death count by around 10x before they can be in Israel’s league.

Thank you! I can finally fill the void that vibeless OSes have left in my soul.

All joking aside, it does raise a good point.

There are many things that can be objectively analyzed and it might not be a good idea to choose them based off of vibes. When you’re designing those things it’s still a good idea to take vibes into account because people will ignore all that and put googly eyes on their 3-D printer.

You pick your OS based on vibes?

The obvious solution is to attach the flamethrower to the drone.

That’s kinda funny. Do people really use that pun?

Only a little.

Every language has some set of rules to how your supposed to construct sentences. Every language has a ton of exceptions to those rules.

The main thing that makes English difficult is that it’s a kind of hybrid language. It’s in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages but it borrows a ton of words from the Romance branch. The grammar is also a weird hybrid (for example we preserve grammatical gender in pronouns, like in German, but we’ve mostly dropped grammatical gender in nouns and articles, like in Chinese.

This is one of the simpler types of exceptions.

Consider the Chinese phrase: 好久不见 Litterally: “good time not see” But then someone explains that while 好 normally means “good” it can also mean “quite” or “alot”.
So it’s fairly easy to remember that it’s generally translated as, “long time no see”.

Those steps are pretty simple for a Chinese learner to understand. It’s also not the hard part of learning a language.

Covering the second half:

I hadn’t heard of Elsagate and had to look it up. How does AI factor into that? As near as I can tell Elsagate started with some random guy making disturbing videos and mislabeling them as child-friendly.

I’m a good bit older than you so my nostalgia doesn’t take me lead me to any of the title you mentioned. For the most part it’s stories that aren’t covered by anyone’s IP. My childhood had a lot of folk tales recited from memory. Those stories were fairly common but there would be regional variation and most tellers would put their own twist on the stories (for example, when my Aunt told the story of the Seven Kids she would do a particular squeaky voice when she got to the part where the wolf swallows the chalk (in her version it was always chalk). That’s actually quite close to how LLMs work. She heard various versions of that story throughout her life, then she repeats it with some other bits that she incorporated from the rest of her life. I do the same thing when I retell the story to my children. It’s basically the same story my Aunt told but I translate it into English and add some modern slang.

What would stop an AI from writing Scar into the Lion King? If you told an LLM to, “Write Hamlet but have all the royal family be Lions,” it’s likely you’d get some evil lion version of Claudius.

There were a lot of homosexual coded villains in older media. There were also a lot of films where all the black people were bad guys, all the Asian people were goofy servants and all the women were housewives or prizes. The general consensus today is that those choices were horribly discriminatory. If AI manages to avoid that sort of behavior it would be a good thing.

The flip side is also that artists can just as easily slip hateful material into otherwise reasonable art. Human history is full of unethical choices. Even if the AI itself doesn’t have ethics the people using it can be held to the same ethical standards as the users of any other tool or medium.

OK. With that change we get:

AI produces something not-actual-art. Some people want stuff that’s not-actual-art. Before AI they had no choice but to pay a premium to a talented artist even though they didn’t actually need it. Now they can get what they actually want but we should remove that so they have to continue paying artists because we had been paying artists for this in the past?

Is that accurate?

The rest of your comment seems to be an other thread so I’ll respond separately.

It wasn’t really that bad.

They only had the numbers of local people and the phone book would just give you name, address and phone number. If you’re the Terminator and there happen to be 3 Sarah Connors in the phone book, too bad, you’ve got to visit all 3 of them. You could ask to have your number unlisted and many people did, particularly celebrities. Nobody had an on-line presence so the only way people would even know the name of most people was if you told them.

I can live with that.

I’d support a UBI so that anyone who wants to can just make art for their own fulfillment. If someone wants AI art though they should be allowed to use that.

That wasn’t intentional.

Would it be more accurate for me to change “want” to “need” or the other way around?

It’s an awkward phrase but I was trying to stay as close to the original vocabulary as possible. I think the point still stands if you replace “not-actual-art” with illustration. People couldn’t get what they were looking for so they paid more for the next best thing. Now they can get something closer to what they’re looking for at a lower price.

I get that and there are a lot of jobs that people used to pay for and no longer do.

The entire horse industry has mostly collapsed. I couldn’t get a job as scribe. With any luck, all the industries around fossil fuel will go away. We’re going to pay less to most people in those industries too.