Microsoft removes guide on how to train LLMs on pirated Harry Potter books
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I guess they are assuming JK Rowling will pass away in the the next 30 years? It's not an unreasonable assumption given that she is 60 already.
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Thanks, though I was thinking more generally, as a policy for any article.
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Should have used Frankenstein. It's in the public domain so there's no copyright concerns and it would have been ironic, what with Microsoft building a Torment Nexus and all.
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There’s no excuse possible. No adult human in the west could possibly think that Harry Potter was free of copyright.
Only “researchers” so accustomed to stealing their training materials (because that’s all they have ever done) would make such a mistake.
Only “researchers” so accustomed to stealing their training materials (because that’s all they have ever done) would make such a mistake.
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Funny how these AI companies get all butt hurt and cry foul when other AI companies try training off their AI models without some license or agreement. But it's perfectly fine for them to turn around and steal someone else's IP and use it unlicensed with their model and try saying it's fair use or encourage others to do the same.
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With sociopathic techbro help, AI interpreted that scenario as “rob the poor to feed the rich”.
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It’s a tempting position, but in addition to being a huge piece of shit she is still an author, whose work deserves protection. Slippery slopes, “they came for JK and I said nothing”, etc.
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Yes, but don't you dare scrape an AI to create your own AI or they'll release the hounds.
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Like Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland and Dracula.
Definitely "long-forgotten"! [/s]
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Tell it to anyone who's ever written a story with Dracula in it. There must be millions of those.
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You realise of course that Robin Hood didn't rob "the rich", he robbed the tax collectors and gave the people back their own tax money? Robin Hood was the original "taxation is theft".
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relevantusername
Smack-Fu Master, in training
The archive.is link redirected me to the Russia Today website which is pretty weird but I'm pretty sure it's a sign that copyright is evil because it mostly protects big interests that don't need protecting just like every other law in this fascist reality, for now. How Russia Today is involved I don't really know but I'm almost certain it's a meaningless misdirection and the real important thing is we destroy the paywalls that have turned the internet into a giant soul gem containing the souls of all humanity. Because like it's one thing for us all to be mixed together like this it's another thing for us to not be able to access our own soul unless we're able to pay wtf who thought this was a good idea
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In the earliest recorded tales, he had no problem simply robbing the rich--specifically those abusing their offices such as clergy or the Sheriff--and building up a treasure chest. In the First Fytte of The Geste of Robyn Hode, he and his pals are hungry, and decide to find a mark to pay for a feast. The Sorrowful Knight turns out to be a good drinking buddy, but being down on his luck, not such a lucrative patron. Robyn likes him, though, so pays off the debt the Knight owes so the Knight can keep his lands.
In other words, his band had plenty of money to buy their own lunch, but decided it would be a better investment to have a knight owe them a favor
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This is certainly true, but the question is more about whether you should than whether you could. It is famous and cherished, and poorly written. I would really prefer to read AI responses that were not trained on Harry Potter writing style.
I'm sure this will enrage Harry Potter heads, but as a long time reader of science fiction and fantasy, I can barely tolerate reading Harry Potter. Maybe a good introductory series for young people, but certainly not the pinnacle of the writing art.
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I was of course vaguelly aware of Harry Potter through cultural reference, but I'd never read the books or seen the movies or bothered discussing anything, so the sum total of my knowledge of it was "Magical secret wizard school and a kid joins it, and there's good wizards and evil wizards and one of them has a forbidden name, also owls... also broom stick racing?". That, and I knew how good the "theme music" was, thanks to it being another instant classic from John Williams. That was it. That was all I knew. Oh, glasses. I knew that... glasses.
That all changed the year before last when a friend wanted me to read the books, specifically to get me a box set. I said I'd be alright with that on the condition that it was a used set, so not a single dime went to Rowling. This saved my friend money, so it was agreed. I got that used paperback set and read through it. After all that, I can say that it was a bit of a journey. I GET why it was an instant success. It's got everything it needed to capture children's imagination. I don't think they're badly written in that sense, and the "reading level" does seem to steadily go up over the course of the books. With that said, I feel like my personal favorite of the whole set is the second book. I felt like that one paced itself a lot better than the rest. My biggest frustration as the series went on was just how... well... bad Harry was at the whole wizarding thing? Not in a charming "He's not very good but comes up with clever solutions to make up for it" kind of way either. He just sort of slacks off and mopes through his lessons a lot of the time, and spent a whole year cheating his way through one class without even learning some fundamentals or something. I know how these stories are supposed to go. The kid who's bad at the traditional way is supposed to surprise everyone by unlocking powerful spells only someone with his unique perspective can manage. That's what cartoons taught me anyway. He actually DOES manage to get some help learning a spell with repeated practice in one book, nice, but yeah, that frustrated me. When I'm spending so MUCH time with him just going through the motions through a whole school year with very little of the main plot moving on, and also very little character development... it got dull.
The very last book just about tore it. He runs away from school, and I think "finally, he's going to get himself some training because he's not powerful enough", and he spends most of the book running away in a magic tent and falling backwards into just barely surviving most of the time. No new spells or anything, he just lucked out. The villain's big plan amounts to a schoolyard brawl, and I began to realize... muggles could have taken this guy out with seven well placed sniper rounds. Just burn through his extra lives. Even the "killing curse" seemed to change to an aimed spell that could outright miss, and even if it just "clipped an ear" didn't do much than that. The killing curse switched from this horrifying unstoppable thing to well... a gun.
But, most disappointing of all is the books spend so much time setting up all the problems of the hidden world, the injustices and issues, and I think I know where it's going. A promise to change wizard society in exchange for an army of the downtrodden to help Harry. Heck, it'll be easy, the villains just corrupted the whole government of wizard world, so they have to overthrow the system ANYWAY. It's all perfect. Then... nothing... The house elves apparently change their minds and WANT to be slaves (so bizarre, how does being freed keep them from still working for a wizard house if they choose to?), the giants and centaurs once again retreat, and for some reason Harry decides to become a magic cop to enforce the system that oppressed HIM, very specifically him! Part of me wonders if Rowling got cold feet by the end and couldn't fully commit, and the other part wonders if she set up all these very obvious story threads without even realizing what's what she was doing and how that's normally SUPPOSED to go in a story like that.
So, as someone in their 40's decades behind everyone else in actually figuring out what all this was all about... all I can say is this. I get it, I understand why it was popular, but it didn't deliver what I'd hoped and I personally didn't much care for the overall story. I recommend, I dunno, The Worst Witch?
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My daughter read them as they came out, at the age Harry was in each book, more or less. What I appreciate about what the author did was how the writing style and thematic elements grow with the reader, which I am willing to accept she at least let good editors help her accomplish. My own primary issue with the series is that--like Luke Skywalker--Harry rarely took agency for himself, preferring mopery and self-pity. Furthermore, outside of being a flying broom prodigy, most of his magical expertise seemed to have been a result of his mother's protective spell and its unforeseen impact binding him to Voldemort.
Without getting (too much) into armchair psychoanalysis, combining that with the ideas that Harry was abused, the father he idolized but never knew appears to have been an asshole, and that as you point out the author chose to have her oppressed hero embrace the corrupt system as long as he and his friends were in charge in the denoument, I have to wonder if these things help inform her own reluctance to admit her own blindness to the implications of her own prejudices once she overcame the hardships she is happy to point out she faced before subsequently becoming wealthier than the Queen.
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It's funny you mention agency, because reading a lot of positively ancient stories, what's interesting to me is how "agency" wasn't really a concern of a large number of them. I suppose it's a modern storytelling expectation, perhaps from our expectation of agency in our own lives compared to how people generally were born into the role they'd have for the rest of their lives, in the town or even house they'd eventually die in, and even their marriage and career was decided for them. In such an environment, I guess it's no wonder most stories from that time were about characters caught up in a river of events determined by fate, and often read like a chronology of events. That's still interesting in that it's an exploration often of how these characters grow and feel in response to that river of events beyond their control, sometimes all leading up to a single decision that's actually IN their control by the end, but it's most certainly alien to the modern mind. The past is a great place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.
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AI reading the books is no more pirating them than a human reading them, and the law is clear on that point
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I started on Enid Blyton. Kids need something simple and easy to absorb to get them started reading. It doesn't have to be literature, and indeed it probably shouldn't be.
I liked Swallows and Amazons more. And some others too. But it was never about the writing style as such. It was always about a magic world of some sort, even if in some cases the magic was grounded in reality, or created by the child protagonists.
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I'm curious who you think says otherwise, or even why you think that adds anything to the discussion on what an automated model might distribute as its output?
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Eh, I feel slightly bad for MS here. This wasn't a policy or a product. Instead a random employee was an idiot. They arguably committed a crime, that would normally have no consequences. I'd like assume they won't be fired or anything. But regardless, the obvious takeaway for MS is to kill personal blogs, making their corporate world slightly more sterile and depressing than it already is.
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Hopefully this relatively minor event isn't going to be enough to make them hit the berserk button. Potter is big enough that in some senses it is less problematic than if the researcher chose some obscure but copyright text.
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As someone who grew up reading them, and then went through them as an adult again. I pretty much agree with your assessment. I loved the books as a kid, but as an adult it's clear that the movies were better stories because she had more experienced writers to smooth the stories over and cut out the parts that don't go anywhere important. She's kind of a one hit wonder as an author, in that she hasn't been able to write anything decent after the Harry Potter series, and what she's managed to sell afterwards is essentially poor derivates of that series because even though they're set in the same universe they don't seem to have the same worldbuilding charm.
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For me, "worldbuilding" isn't critically important to tell a good story, though I do appreciate when it's there so long as it doesn't detract and is used to build upon themes. That said, it's VERY important for building a SETTING for a variety of stories. If there's one thing I picked up from Harry Potter, it's that personally I don't think there was much of an eye towards world building in that sense. The whole setting seems to be constructed around the main character, Larry Pottsman I think his name is, and so long as it's being told from his perspective, it works perfectly fine. It's when one tries to expand beyond that and attempt to pick a different time period or a different location or a whole other aspect of the world that the voids at the edge of the setting become more apparent. I think about a setting like Star Wars, and just how much work it took so many different authors to create an expanded universe, considering Star Wars in the original trilogy (or Orig Trig as everyone loves to call it all the time, you know how they do) was Luke Skywalker's story and everyone else was just living in it. The books, and later games, did so MUCH to expand it, but any time they tried to cram in more material specifically around the exact events of the movies, it started to feel more and more crowded precisely because world building wasn't really the focus of those first movies.
I think there's potential for Harry Potter to get the world building the fans would adore, but at this point, not under Rowling. So, fan projects will have to do. It's not really my thing, but that's my recommendation. If you want to build a world right, sometimes you just gotta do it yourself.
I'm trying to separate her politics from her writing skill a bit, and see things through the eyes of a child. A fair assessment is that Harry Potter is a competently written children-to-young adult series focused on the story of one kid growing to accept things about himself and come into his own as a potential hero. The flaws I find in it's world building and themes notwithstanding, at least as far as teaching kids they're special and matter even in a dangerous world, she did capable work, even if it's not my favorite in that sense. Thematically, it's very much of that neoliberal bend, and I can't fault it any more than countless other popular children's stories for that. It didn't do a lot of what I'd have expected, and there are shortcomings if she ever intended to take it further into a truly mature tale that fully explored all the themes it touched on, but I'm not sure she had a desire to do any of that in the first place.
None of that explains or even predicts the kind of wretch she's become in recent years. It PARTLY predicts her dedication to systems as they stand right now, that they can never fail, but can only BE failed, but her decision to dedicate so much of her current life and money towards (unfortunately successfully) campaigning against one of the very groups previously inspired by her stories is a result, I think of her more recent trips down the rabbit hole of alt right nonsense. They're still her choices to make, but there's a path from where she was to where she is, and while the books don't to me speak to her having believed a lot of that stuff already (though there are SOME preconceptions), it at least speaks to the existing vulnerabilities in her world view that could be easiily exploited. Now, the way she talks,the books she's written, I don't think she could even write Harry Potter again were she to do it all over.
I guess in terms of things that I noticed that bugged me a bit in those books? Well, there's the magical "no boys allowed" stairs, which were a bit silly and presumed a few things about boys and girls, but fine, I don't think she put much thought into it. There's that other bit though that rubbed me the wrong way, when Harry at one point tells an otherwise kind teacher he's not really interested in finding a girl for the dance, and she gets incredibly stern and basically orders him to find a date because that's the done thing, no excuses. No allowances for aromantic, asexual, or even just a "late bloomer" or that his mood was rather sour at the time, his teacher just said "get in a relationship if you want to pass this year". Yeah, I can safely say that I have no idea how I'd have responded if I was given such an ultimatum by someone in a position of authority over me. Usually it's a lot less personal and just a systemic "you pay more taxes for being single" or "good look finding a house that fits your lifestyle" sort of thing. Anyway, that underlying assumption was there, but I don't think she realized she was making such an assumption when she did.
But one thing's for sure now... she knew exactly what she was doing when she decided to take a day off from her usual targets to attack the asexual community for daring to exist and just told us all to shut up and stop whining.
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Did fanfiction die?
Back in my day, it was a popular hobby among queer literary 20-something women. It was closely related to the online blogging and larping. As far as I know, online larping is still a niche thing, but blogs basically died off, and I think fanfic died with them?
Checking fanfiction.net... it looks like yes, fanfiction died with Harry Potter and Twilight. That's pretty sad.
It was never much of an art but it was more art than most people do.
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Are the newsgroups still a good place for that? I want to see the continuing adventures of Captain Self-Insert!
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Thanks! This one has more super-hero and K-pop fic than Harry Potter and twilight, so yes is more recent, though it's hard to tell exactly how active it is. Also a huge % of Chinese writers, which sort of isn't surprising since I guess China got online in the last decade, and sort of is surprising because I think of China as having its own internet spaces which are also aggressively firewalled against lgbtq child sex fantasies.
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"Gimme five bees for a quarter," you'd say. Now where was I...
Gosh those silly faddish trends! "Fan fiction," women riding bicycles, horseless carriages! So glad to live in this modern age where such things are consigned to the embarrassing commonplace books of history!
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I mean, it's obvious that the shape of the internet has changed in the last 30 years, but difficult to tell what has happened since I'm no longer within the culture.
Likewise it seems like online forums appear to be dying out, but perhaps they just moved to discord, or reddit ate them.
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AO3 is very active. Annoyingly there's a lot of really awful stuff in there and AO3 doesn't have a good blacklist, but there's plenty of recent additions in a bunch of different fan communities.
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I've only just recently accepted the push into Discord for certain chats with friends, only to find that the topic of the day on Discord is "What's a good alternative? Anyone want to host a Teamspeak server?". I'll be off Discord the very instant it demands to see my ID.
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One of my oldest friends literally got a full ride scholarship to college based on her portfolio of writing… most of which was Harry Potter fanfic
(She’s a published author now, and yes, as fits the stereotype for this, she is also very very gay)
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Her detective stories are decent enough (I read one), and their BBC adaptations have so far run to six series.
She's comfortable working the tropes I think - so she'll never be one of the great literary authors, but in certain genres that's exactly what you do.
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