A Belated Apology to the Music Industry

One of the things that frustrated me as a writer was when writers would then steal a photo for their blog and be shocked to discover that photos have copyrights and use, when, like of course they do. (Also, if you've been blogging as long as I have, you've watched this discovery occur a few times.) 

But with this AI stealing all the text it can find, I realized I had had my own thing that I had missed. I blogged a little about the town hall with Pandora I went to way back when: http://www.talkapedia.com/2007/09/pandora.html?m=1 Interestingly I did not mention in my blog post that part of the reason the Pandora team was hanging out in DC was to convince Congress they shouldn't have to pay the same rates radio stations did to play songs. But looking back this was music streamers basically setting up a service that used music and sold music access to it's users, and then didn't want to pay for said music access. 

And the AI/Large Language models need text written by actual humans in order to appropriately mimic human speech, but then don't want to pay for the very thing they need. I mean, they could of course write their own text. But that would take longer than stealing other people's text. So they don't want to do that. And then the AI people pretend that this roadblock suddenly appeared. As if the text they stole had just been lying out in the break room and they had no way to know it belonged to someone when they took it. 

So now of course our music industry is impacted by the rules the streamers retroactively forced through. And I hope we won't see the same with LLMs. Not just because some of my text has been stolen. But also, I hope we can learn from our past mistakes. 

Accessibility Helps Everyone

With the news of the CPB winding down, people were reminiscing about favorite PBS shows and I was reminded of a show I stumbled across as a teen. I apologize, I no longer remember the title. But the show used popular music videos and captioned them with highlights to note specific phonetic phenomenon. So all the long e's would be highlighted blue, while all the rest of the letters were white. It was a cool fun way to teach the concepts. 

I understood phonetics pretty well as a teen, but my parents didn't want to pay for cable TV. Cable TV at the time, was the only way to access music videos. Well, cable TV and this show. So I watched to get to see music videos. 

My mother had a book about "Sesame Street" as part of her coursework for her masters degree that I read for funsies. 

It talked about how the show was designed to help lower and middle class  bilingual children learn concepts about language and numbers that would help them catch up to monolingual English speaking classmates of middle and upper classes. And it did raise their skills. It just also raised the skills of the monolingual English speakers also. 

One of the things that can be easy to overlook in places where you have privilege is that better accessibility benefits you to. So when we lose things like the CPB, yes some people will be harder hit by this loss. But the things we lose affect everyone.