Daily Archives: August 9, 2023

‘We’re changing the clouds.’ An unintended test of geoengineering is fueling record ocean warmth

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researchers are now waking up to another factor, one that could be filed under the category of unintended consequences: disappearing clouds known as ship tracks. Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulfur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. The 2020 IMO rule “is a big natural experiment,” says Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We’re changing the clouds.”

By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster, several new studies have found. That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions. It’s as if the world suddenly lost the cooling effect from a fairly large volcanic eruption each year, says Michael Diamond, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University.

The natural experiment created by the IMO rules is providing a rare opportunity for climate scientists to study a geoengineering scheme in action—although it is one that is working in the wrong direction. Indeed, one such strategy to slow global warming, called marine cloud brightening, would see ships inject salt particles back into the air, to make clouds more reflective. In Diamond’s view, the dramatic decline in ship tracks is clear evidence that humanity could cool off the planet significantly by brightening the clouds. “It suggests pretty strongly that if you wanted to do it on purpose, you could,” he says.

The influence of pollution on clouds remains one of the largest sources of uncertainty in how quickly the world will warm up, says Franziska Glassmeier, an atmospheric scientist at the Delft University of Technology. Progress on understanding these complex interactions has been slow. “Clouds are so variable,” Glassmeier says.

Some of the basic science is fairly well understood. Sulfate or salt particles seed clouds by creating nuclei for vapor to condense into droplets. The seeds also brighten existing clouds by creating smaller, more numerous droplets. The changes don’t stop there, says Robert Wood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington. He notes that smaller droplets are less likely to merge with others, potentially suppressing rainfall. That would increase the size of clouds and add to their brightening effect. But modeling also suggests that bigger clouds are more likely to mix with dry air, which would reduce their reflectivity.

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Source: ‘We’re changing the clouds.’ An unintended test of geoengineering is fueling record ocean warmth | Science | AAAS

The Fear Of AI and Entitled Cancel Culture Just Killed A Very Useful Tool: Prosecraft

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I do understand why so many people, especially creative folks, are worried about AI and how it’s used. The future is quite unknown, and things are changing very rapidly, at a pace that can feel out of control. However, when concern and worry about new technologies and how they may impact things morphs into mob-inspiring fear, dumb things happen. I would much rather that when we look at new things, we take a more realistic approach to them, and look at ways we can keep the good parts of what they provide, while looking for ways to mitigate the downsides.

Hopefully without everyone going crazy in the meantime. Unfortunately, that’s not really the world we live in.

Last year, when everyone was focused on generative AI for images, we had Rob Sheridan on the podcast to talk about why it was important for creative people to figure out how to embrace the technology rather than fear it. The opening story of the recent NY Times profile of me was all about me in a group chat, trying to suggest to some very creative Hollywood folks how to embrace AI rather than simply raging against it. And I’ve already called out how folks rushing to copyright, thinking that will somehow “save” them from AI, are barking up the wrong tree.

But, in the meantime, the fear over AI is leading to some crazy and sometimes unfortunate outcomes. Benji Smith, who created what appears to be an absolutely amazing tool for writers, Shaxpir, also created what looked like an absolutely fascinating tool called Prosecraft, that had scanned and analyzed a whole bunch of books and would let you call up really useful data on books.

He created it years ago, based on an idea he had years earlier, trying to understand the length of various books (which he initially kept in a spreadsheet). As Smith himself describes in a blog post:

I heard a story on NPR about how Kurt Vonnegut invented an idea about the “shapes of stories” by counting happy and sad words. The University of Vermont “Computational Story Lab” published research papers about how this technique could show the major plot points and the “emotional story arc” of the Harry Potter novels (as well as many many other books).

So I tried it myself and found that I could plot a graph of the emotional ups and downs of any story. I added those new “sentiment analysis” tools to the prosecraft website too.

When I ran out of books on my own shelves, I looked to the internet for more text that I could analyze, and I used web crawlers to find more books. I wanted to be mindful of the diversity of different stories, so I tried to find books by authors of every race and gender, from every different cultural and political background, writing in every different genre and exploring all different kinds of themes. Fiction and nonfiction and philosophy and science and religion and culture and politics.

Somewhere out there on the internet, I thought to myself, there was a new author writing a horror or romance or fantasy novel, struggling for guidance about how long to write their stories, how to write more vivid prose, and how much “passive voice” was too much or too little.

I wanted to give those budding storytellers a suite of “lexicographic” tools that they could use, to compare their own writing with the writing of authors they admire. I’ve been working in the field of computational linguistics and machine learning for 20+ years, and I was always frustrated that the fancy tools were only accessible to big businesses and government spy agencies. I wanted to bring that magic to everyone.

Frankly, all of that sounds amazing. And amazingly useful. Even more amazing is that he built it, and it worked. It would produce useful analysis of books, such as this example from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

And, it could also do further analysis like the following:

This is all quite interesting. It’s also the kind of thing that data scientists do on all kinds of work for useful purposes.

Smith built Prosecraft into Shaxpir, again, making it a more useful tool. But, on Monday, some authors on the internet found out about it and lost their shit, leading Smith to shut the whole project down.

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about all of this. Smith notes that he had researched the copyright issues and was sure he wasn’t violating anything, and he’s right. We’ve gone over this many times before. Scanning books is pretty clearly fair use. What you do with that later could violate copyright law, but I don’t see anything that Prosecraft did that comes anywhere even remotely close to violating copyright law.

But… some authors got pretty upset about all of it.

I’m still perplexed at what the complaint is here? You don’t need to “consent” for someone to analyze your book. You don’t need to “consent” to someone putting up statistics about their analysis of your book.

But, Zach’s tweet went viral with a bunch of folks ready to blow up anything that smacks of tech bro AI, and lots of authors started yelling at Smith.

The Gizmodo article has a ridiculously wrong “fair use” analysis, saying “Fair Use does not, by any stretch of the imagination, allow you to use an author’s entire copyrighted work without permission as a part of a data training program that feeds into your own ‘AI algorithm.’” Except… it almost certainly does? Again, we’ve gone through this with the Google Book scanning case, and the courts said that you can absolutely do that because it’s transformative.

It seems that what really tripped up people here was the “AI” part of it, and the fear that this was just another a VC funded “tech bro” exercise of building something to get rich by using the works of creatives. Except… none of that is accurate. As Smith explained in his blog post:

For what it’s worth, the prosecraft website has never generated any income. The Shaxpir desktop app is a labor of love, and during most of its lifetime, I’ve worked other jobs to pay the bills while trying to get the company off the ground and solve the technical challenges of scaling a startup with limited resources. We’ve never taken any VC money, and the whole company is a two-person operation just working our hardest to serve our small community of authors.

He also recognizes that the concerns about it being some “AI” thing are probably what upset people, but plenty of authors have found the tool super useful, and even added their own books:

I launched the prosecraft website in the summer of 2017, and I started showing it off to authors at writers conferences. The response was universally positive, and I incorporated the prosecraft analytic tools into the Shaxpir desktop application so that authors could privately run these analytics on their own works-in-progress (without ever sharing those analyses publicly, or even privately with us in our cloud).

I’ve spent thousands of hours working on this project, cleaning up and annotating text, organizing and tweaking things. A small handful of authors have even reached out to me, asking to have their books added to the website. I was grateful for their enthusiasm.

But in the meantime, “AI” became a thing.

And the arrival of AI on the scene has been tainted by early use-cases that allow anyone to create zero-effort impersonations of artists, cutting those creators out of their own creative process.

That’s not something I ever wanted to participate in.

Smith took the project down entirely because of that. He doesn’t want to get lumped in with other projects, and even though his project is almost certainly legal, he recognized that this was becoming an issue:

Today the community of authors has spoken out, and I’m listening. I care about you, and I hear your objections.

Your feelings are legitimate, and I hope you’ll accept my sincerest apologies. I care about stories. I care about publishing. I care about authors. I never meant to hurt anyone. I only hoped to make something that would be fun and useful and beautiful, for people like me out there struggling to tell their own stories.

I find all of this really unfortunate. Smith built something really cool, really amazing, that does not, in any way, infringe on anyone’s rights. I get the kneejerk reaction from some authors, who feared that this was some obnoxious project, but couldn’t they have taken 10 minutes to look at the details of what it was they were killing?

I know we live in an outrage era, where the immediate reaction is to turn the outrage meter up to 11. I’m certainly guilty of that at times myself. But this whole incident is just sad. It was an overreaction from the start, destroying what had been a clear labor of love and a useful project, through misleading and misguided attacks from authors.

Source: The Fear Of AI Just Killed A Very Useful Tool | Techdirt

Preservation Fail: Hasbro Wants Old ‘Transformers’ Games Re-Released, Except Activision Might Have Lost Them

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And here we go again. we’ve been talking about how copyright has gotten in the way of cultural preservation generally for a while, and more specifically lately when it comes to the video game industry. The way this problem manifests itself is quite simple: video game publishers support the games they release for some period of time and then they stop. When they stop, depending on the type of game, it can make that game unavailable for legitimate purchase or use, either because the game is disappeared from retail and online stores, or because the servers needed to make them operational are taken offline. Meanwhile, copyright law prevents individuals and, in some cases, institutions from preserving and making those games available to the public, a la a library or museum would.

When you make these preservation arguments, one of the common retorts you get from the gaming industry and its apologists is that publishers already preserve these games for eventual re-release down the road, which is why they need to maintain their copyright protection on that content. We’ve pointed out failures to do so by the industry in the past, but the story about Hasbro wanting to re-release several older Transformers video games, but can’t, is about as perfect an example as I can find.

Released in June 2010, Transformers: War for Cybertron was a well-received third-person shooter that got an equally great sequel in 2012, Fall of Cybertron. (And then in 2014 we got Rise of Dark Spark, which wasn’t very good and was tied into the live-action films.) What made the first two games so memorable and beloved was that they told their own stories about the origins of popular characters like Megatron and Optimus Prime while featuring kick-ass combat that included the ability to transform into different vehicles. Sadly, in 2018, all of these Activision-published Transformers games (and several it commissioned from other developers) were yanked from digital stores, making them hard to acquire and play in 2023. It seems that Hasbro now wants that to change, suggesting the games could make a perfect fit for Xbox Game Pass, once Activision, uh…finds them.

You read that right: finds them. What does that mean? Well, when Hasbro came calling to Activision looking to see if this was a possibility, it devolved into Activision doing a theatrical production parody called Dude, Where’s My Hard Drive? It seems that these games may or may not exist on some piece of hardware, but Activision literally cannot find it. Or maybe not, as you’ll read below. There seems to be some confusion about what Activision can and cannot find.

And, yes, the mantra in the comments that pirate sites are essentially solving for this problem certainly applies here as well. So much so, in fact, that it sure sounds like Hasbro went that route to get what it needed for the toy design portion of this.

Interestingly, Activision’s lack of organization seems to have caused some headaches for Hasbro’s toy designers who are working on the Gamer Edition figures. The toy company explained that it had to load up the games on their original platforms and play through them to find specific details they wanted to recreate for the toys.

“For World of Cybertron we had to rip it ourselves, because [Activision] could not find it—they kept sending concept art instead, which we didn’t want,” explained Hasbro. “So we booted up an old computer and ripped them all out from there. Which was a learning experience and a long weekend, because we just wanted to get it right, so that’s why we did it like that.

What’s strange is that despite the above, Activision responded to initial reports of all this indicating that the headlines were false and it does have… code. Or something.

Hasbro itself then followed up apologizing for the confusion, also saying that it made an error in stating the games were “lost”. But what’s strange about all that, in addition to the work that Hasbro did circumventing having access to the actual games themselves, is the time delta it took for Activision to respond to all of this.

Activision has yet to confirm if it actually knows where the source code for the games is specifically located. I also would love to know why Activision waited so long to comment (the initial interview was posted on July 28) and why Hasbro claimed to not have access to key assets when developing its toys based on the games.

It’s also strange that Hasbro, which says it wants to put these games on Game Pass, hasn’t done so for years now. If the games aren’t lost, give ‘em to Hasbro, then?

Indeed. If this was all a misunderstanding, so be it. But if this was all pure misunderstanding, the rest of the circumstances surrounding this story don’t make a great deal of sense. At the very least, it sounds like some of the concern that these games could have simply been lost to the world is concerning and yet another data point for an industry that simply needs to do better when it comes to preservation efforts.

Source: Preservation Fail: Hasbro Wants Old ‘Transformers’ Games Re-Released, Except Activision Might Have Lost Them | Techdirt