Cowboy Who?

Dear Applicant,

Congratulations. You have been admitted to our prestigious graduate school program, which will not drastically improve your career prospects, but will allow you to avoid adulting for another year or two (or six, for the particularly diligent researchers and those who chose an undergraduate major in a subject with no real-world application). Before you arrive, you’ll need to secure housing. Here are some options:

• 458 Memorial Ave. Beautiful river views, convenient location only a five-minute walk from campus. Very spacious, but a little noisy. Pet-friendly, overnight guests allowed. Only $600 a month. This is a parking spot, but you could probably set up a tent; make sure to evade the university police’s weekly forced removal.
• 950 Amherst St. This listing uses the word “veranda,” so you know you can’t afford it.
• Bezos Hall. The newest graduate-student dorm, donated by a magnanimous billionaire who believes in education, philanthropy, and your lack of other job opportunities after graduation. We host weekly social events, such as pick-up games—i.e., package pick-up games.
• 177 Beacon St. One-bedroom apartment, unfurnished, two bus stops from campus. It costs $1,250 monthly, electricity and water included. Sorry, this has been claimed in the time it took you to read the last two sentences.
• Cozy mahogany-oak coffin. For just $1.5K a month, you can sleep like Edward Cullen. Velvet-lined, remodeled with a Federal Housing Administration-compliant breathing straw so you don’t become an actual corpse. Utilities not included.
• 8300 Maple Ct. Beautiful brick townhouse at an affordable price. Central air-conditioning, cats allowed. Quiet location, pleasant nature trail in backyard. Only a thirty-minute drive from the closest grocery store. (NOTE: This listing is two states away from your school, but you can commute.)
• Underneath your own desk. Since you’ll be a first-year graduate student, you won’t get your own office, but your desk (and the space beneath it) can be quite comfortable. Incredible location, convenience, and cost can’t be beat. Electricity, heating, and internet all included. Showers are available at the campus gym. Neighbors are somewhat eccentric and prone to making poor decisions, like attending graduate school.

To help offset the costs of living, we have also awarded you with a stipend made of three Walmart coupons and this tenure application from an overqualified woman of color that we found in the wastebasket.

Orientation is in early September. We are so honored to contribute to your debt-filled future.

— Elite Graduate School

For the last four decades, technology has been mostly a force for greater inequality and a shrinking middle class. But new empirical evidence suggests that the age of AI could be different. We speak to MIT's David Autor, one of the greatest labor economists in the world, who envisions a future where we use AI to make a wider array of workers much better at a whole range of jobs and help rebuild the middle class.

This episode was produced by Dave Blanchard and edited by Molly Messick. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Katherine Silva. Jess Jiang is Planet Money's acting executive producer.

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Sometimes I have something to say but the topic is not worthy of a full blog post.  In this case I have gathered four topics which I believe are interesting but not necessarily related and put them into this consolidated blog post.  Enjoy!

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Julie Mabry, who opened Pearl Bar in 2013, said the bar was created to provide a safe space for those in Houston's LGBTQ+ community.

(Image credit: Google Maps)

DEKALB, IL—Saying the change was long overdue and would make the workplace a more welcoming environment for many female employees, local marketing services firm UpVision designated a special room Friday where women could moan in pain. “Starting today, any and all women who are currently experiencing extreme discomfort…

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A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Pediatrics found a significant decrease in birth weight of 154 grams in babies of women who smoked marijuana during the first trimester, with such decreases in weight being linked to health problems as children grow. What do you think?

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The Supreme Court has ruled that Andy Warhol has infringed on the copyright of Lynn Goldsmith, the photographer who took the image that he used for his famous silkscreen of the musician Prince. Goldsmith won the justices over 7-2, disagreeing with Warhol's camp that his work was transformative enough to prevent any copyright claims. In the majority opinion written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, she noted that "Goldsmith's original works, like those of other photographers, are entitled to copyright protection, even against famous artists." 

Goldsmith's story goes as far back as 1984, when Vanity Fair licensed her Prince photo for use as an artist reference. The photographer received $400 for a one-time use of her photograph, which Warhol then used as the basis for a silkscreen that the magazine published. Warhol then created 15 additional works based on her photo, one of which was sold to Condé Nast for another magazine story about Prince. The Andy Warhol Foundation (AWF) — the artist had passed away by then — got $10,000 it, while Goldsmith didn't get anything. 

Typically, the use of copyrighted material for a limited and "transformative" purpose without the copyright holder's permission falls under "fair use." But what passes as "transformative" use can be vague, and that vagueness has led to numerous lawsuits. In this particular case, the court has decided that adding "some new expression, meaning or message" to the photograph does not constitute "transformative use." Sotomayor said Goldsmith's photo and Warhol's silkscreen serve "substantially the same purpose." 

Indeed, the decision could have far ranging implications for fair use and could influence future cases on what constitutes as transformative work. Especially now that we're living in the era of content creators who could be taking inspiration from existing music and art. As CNN reports, Justice Elena Kagan strongly disagreed with her fellow justices, arguing that the decision would stifle creativity. She said the justices mostly just cared about the commercial purpose of the work and did not consider that the photograph and the silkscreen have different "aesthetic characteristics" and did not "convey the same meaning."

"Both Congress and the courts have long recognized that an overly stringent copyright regime actually stifles creativity by preventing artists from building on the works of others. [The decision will] impede new art and music and literature, [and it will] thwart the expression of new ideas and the attainment of new knowledge. It will make our world poorer," she wrote. 

The justices who wrote the majority opinion, however, believe that it "will not impoverish our world to require AWF to pay Goldsmith a fraction of the proceeds from its reuse of her copyrighted work. Recall, payments like these are incentives for artists to create original works in the first place."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-supreme-courts-warhol-decision-could-have-huge-copyright-implications-for-fair-use-103547155.html?src=rss

In an ideal world, the oceans wouldn't be full of human garbage. But as long as that trash keeps washing ashore in Texas, conservationists are going to put it to good use.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…

1. Candidate asked for feedback on his interview — after I’d hired him

I interviewed someone today (two interview rounds). I decided to offer him the job a few hours later and he verbally accepted on the phone. He then called me back right away with a couple of clarifying details and a slight negotiation on pay — no problem, I can understand being mildly flustered in the moment and wanting to call back to make the request rather than just leaving it. I said I’d need to see if the increase was possible and I’d come back to him tomorrow.

He then texted me very quickly after that and asked for feedback on his interviews today. Isn’t that a bit weird? I’ve heard of requesting feedback while waiting to hear if you’re being moved to the next stage, or after a rejection to see how you could improve. But why would you want feedback when you’ve already been offered a job? It’s not like the offer was insultingly low or anything, just on the lower end of his requested salary range.

Possibly relevant is he is very young, this would only be his second job out of high school. Have you come across this before? Do you have any insight?

Yeah, it’s because he’s inexperienced and just doesn’t know the norms around this stuff yet. He’s probably heard you can ask for feedback after an interview, not realizing that that typically means after you’re rejected. If you’re hired, that is the feedback, for most people!

My take would be different if he had asked a more nuanced question like, “Based on our conversations so far, do you have thoughts on where the biggest challenges are likely to be for me and how I can prepare for those?” But it sounds more general than that.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s weird that he wants feedback. Most people would find it interesting to hear an employer’s post-offer analysis of their strengths and weaknesses in the interview! He just doesn’t have the experience yet to realize it’s not typically asked.

Related:
can I ask my new manager why she hired me?

2. When your mom was a scandal back in the day

I (F, 57) am a volunteer at a local secular nonprofit and was chatting with another volunteer (F, 60+) the other day. I was trying to recover from hearing some bad news and she tried to comfort me by saying that God would take care of me. To fend off the unwanted religion talk, I blurted out that that doesn’t make me feel better, because my late mother was kicked out of her church after someone tricked her into making a big mistake and her life fell apart. I wish I hadn’t said anything, because it turns out one of my friend’s few relatives in our country lives in my hometown and goes to the same church my mother did.

I don’t know what to do if she gossips with her relative and finds out that my mother was the reason their handsome young pastor needed to transfer to another county back in the day. He seduced her, claimed they had a secret engagement, and denied any such plans when she fell pregnant and refused to get a back-alley abortion. Of course, his version was that she was a temptress who wanted to ruin his reputation, and of course the patriarchy believed his version over hers. He got a new start and went on to a nice career, while my mother got the shame of our whole town without resources to relocate. It happened over 50 years ago, but if it was a sufficiently juicy story in a small town, people may still gossip about it. I know there was still gossip when I was in school because my mother couldn’t even go to my school concerts without people pointing and whispering.

I don’t need a negative story sticking to me decades after I thought I had escaped it by moving to another part of the country. I don’t know if I have the guts to lie and say it’s false too, or what people will think if they find out I lied to cover up an embarrassing story. I don’t want to be our local version of George Santos. But I don’t want to have to move out of the area to get away from the shame — I have rent control and moving is awful anyway. What options do you recommend?

I think it’s highly unlikely that this will be a subject of gossip 50+ years after the fact! Social norms have changed a lot in that time. If someone gossips about you because they believe your mom was a temptress half a century ago … well, that person is being really, really weird, and anyone they try to gossip to about it is likely to find them really weird as well. It’s unlikely that anyone will think negatively of you because of this.

But if someone asks you about it, my advice is: own it. “Yep, my mom was seduced by a man who abandoned her when she got pregnant and then the whole town shamed her for it but not him. Isn’t that horrible? Thank god the world has changed.”

3. I’m being pressured to take a promotion I don’t want

I have worked with my current company for about 15 years, and anticipate retiring from this company when the time comes. I very much love what I do and who I work with and often get asked to assist other teams with special projects, so my work is never repetitive or dull.

I have been promoted multiple times, and on each occasion I have been asked if I would rather manage the team I was leaving. My answer has always been no, as I was working towards a specific goal and have no interest in managing.

I am now in a role I love, but have reached the top of the ladder career-wise unless I become a manager or director (neither of which I want). I was offered the opportunity to manage my current team and said no. My company then hired a manager I love working with, but they will be retiring soon and I have been asked by a very senior person to “seriously consider” taking over at that time.

This will be the fifth time I have been asked to manage in my career, and I feel like saying no this time may damage my reputation with senior leaders and other departments that I work with regularly. Others in my area would love to be considered, so I feel awkward that I truly do not want to do this.

Logically, I can see that I am a good fit, due to my background, experience in other roles, exposure to project work, and relationships with other areas. My team also treats me as their de facto leader if our manager is out. But I just don’t want to manage.

What do I do? Do I just go ahead and take the promotion, even though I know others want it and I don’t? I have no desire to harm my future prospects in the event I change my mind one day, but I secretly wish my current manager would just stay another 10 years.

I feel this sounds like a six-year-old saying they don’t want to eat vegetables, even though it’s good for them, and I feel stupid even asking this question. What normal person does not want a promotion, after all? Please be kind … I realize I sound like a bragging idiot, and that I am incredibly lucky to have this as a problem … but I have honestly cried about this. I just want to continue to do my current job and do it to the best of my ability. How do I get out of managing without harming my reputation?

You don’t sound like you’re bragging or like a whining child! It’s completely normal and okay not to want to manage, and you don’t need to do it just because people want you to. I mean, if everyone else wanted you to, I don’t know, sell real estate or become a voiceover artist and you didn’t want to, would you feel bad about declining? There’s a weird thing in our culture where it’s assumed everyone wants to move up and up, but a lot of people don’t … and even more of them specifically don’t want to be managers.

Having had past managers who clearly didn’t want to be doing the job — and in one case who had protested against having to — I can tell you that people who manage under duress end up doing their teams (and their employers) no favors. If you don’t want to do the work, you won’t approach it as well as your team deserves. But even if you’d be phenomenal, you do not need to take a job you don’t want. Period.

It’s fine to tell your employer and anyone else who’s pressuring you, “I appreciate the offer, but I’ve given it a lot of thought and I am confident I don’t want to move into management.”

4. Can we be required to use FMLA if we get Covid?

My employer has recently sent a “reminder” that now that the Covid emergency has officially been declared over in the U.S., normal sick time rules apply for Covid and anybody who will be out more than three days has to file an FMLA application, regardless of whether or not they have the paid sick time to cover it. So, that’s anybody who gets Covid who isn’t lucky enough to have two of their required minimum five isolation days fall on a weekend. This is strange, right?

I’ve been looking for information about when your employer can require you to take FMLA and all I’ve been able to find is that you can be required to take it after you file the application, nothing about whether you can be forced to request it for an absence of a week or less when you have the sick time. It seems like the lack of information suggests that this isn’t a thing people normally have to worry about being forced on them. What are the possible ramifications of being forced to take FMLA time, possibly repeatedly, for common illnesses where it’s totally within the averages to be out of commission for about a week?

In general: Your employer can indeed require that you use FMLA when you’re out sick, even if you don’t want to, although it’s not the norm to do it for routine absences of a few days. It’s a pretty anti-employee move, because it means that if at some point you need to take a longer leave of the sort that FMLA is normally used for, you’ll have already used up some of your FMLA allotment for that year. (You get 12 weeks of FMLA-protected leave per year.)

Specifically for your situation: The part of FMLA that would be relevant here is the part for “serious health conditions” (as opposed to caring for a new baby or the other circumstances where you can use it). The law defines “serious health condition” as “requiring continuing treatment by a health care provider” or “a period of incapacity of more than three consecutive, full calendar days with follow-up treatment.” If you have a mild or asymptomatic case of Covid and aren’t seeking treatment, would it even qualify for FMLA? I’d guess no, but you’d need a lawyer to tell you for sure (and they don’t seem to know for sure either).

EDMONTON – As Alberta experiences yet another day of choking smoke from global warming-induced wildfires, the UCP has assured Albertans that they have a plan to prevent this increasingly common disaster from ever happening again: giant fans powered by Alberta’s abundant oil reserves. “Smoke is in the air, fans blow air away, so we’re confident […]

The post UCP promises to build giant gas-powered fans to clear Alberta skies appeared first on The Beaverton.

Residents are asked to make an appointment and provide proof of residency in the community to throw away their larger trash free of charge.

JACKSONVILLE, FL—Stunned and outraged by the results of the Jacksonville mayoral race, Florida Democrats reportedly demanded a recount Thursday after insisting they lost the election. “The Democratic Party condemns our victory, and rest assured, we will not let it stand,” said Mayor-elect Donna Deegan, who confirmed…

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MOSCOW—Pausing their foreplay to haphazardly look around for a prophylactic, Russian president Vladimir Putin reportedly told his girlfriend Thursday that he has been hit with serious sanctions on condoms. “I’m sorry, babe, these sanctions keep getting more and more extreme,” said the longtime leader currently in the…

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Prince Harry, his wife Meghan, and her mother were involved in a “near catastrophic” car chase with paparazzi photographers in New York after an event, drawing some parallels with the high-speed Paris car chase that killed his mother Princess Diana in 1997. What do you think?

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Lacombe, AB – After United Conservative Party candidate Jennifer Johnson compared transgender students to feces baked into a cookie, the UCP is facing criticism for selecting a candidate who endorses the views the party has supported since its conception. “I’m shocked that the party who made weakening Gay Straight Alliances a top priority upon taking […]

The post UCP under fire for running UCP candidate with UCP policies appeared first on The Beaverton.

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SPRINGFIELD, VA—Saying the program represented a significant value for frequent fliers, Transportation Security Administration officials announced Friday the debut of TSA+, a service that allows its members to pat down any of their fellow air travelers standing in the security line. “Once you’ve paid the $79…

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Good morning. We are now in the second half of May, a period I like to call “early summer,” when we first start to see 90-degree temperatures with some regularity, but some nights in the 60s are still possible, and there’s still the thinnest hope of a weak front. That weak front is coming Saturday, and it will bring us a few days with slightly drier air. After that? Well, we’ll be at the end of the month with June right around the corner.

Surely you know what that means?

Thursday

Today will be sunny and warm, with high temperatures around 90 degrees. Winds will be light and variable. Lows tonight will drop to around 70 degrees.

Friday

Did you like Thursday? Good, because Friday and Friday night will be pretty much the same, with only a slight uptick in winds, now coming from the south.

Saturday

A weak front should cross the region on Saturday afternoon and evening. There is not going to be a whole lot of instability for the front to work with, so at this point I’d peg the chances of a shower or thunderstorm at any given location in Houston at about 20 percent during the daytime or evening. Highs will reach about 90 degrees, with partly to mostly cloudy skies.

Sunday

Clouds will linger for much of Sunday, but highs will be slightly cooler in the wake of the front, with highs in the mid-80s. That back-burner, 20 percent chance of rain will linger throughout the day before things clear out Sunday night. Lows should drop into the upper 60s.

Next week

The first two or three days should see highs in the upper 80s and lows in the upper 60s, with partly sunny skies. The air is not going to be dry, but with dewpoints in the low- to mid-60s, this is going to be as dry as it gets for about four months. Temperatures warm to about 90 degrees with muggier air during the second half of the week. In terms of rainfall, it doesn’t look like there will be much.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Our CEO is protecting a horrible employee no one can stand

I was hired as a senior director three years ago with direct reports in 10 office locations in the U.S. and other countries. One is a contractor, John, who I later discovered fabricated his background and experience. John cannot seem to handle the simplest of tasks without someone on the team providing him with exact step-by-step instructions, and he still doesn’t comprehend well. After multiple talks, meetings, illustrations, notes, presentations, and guidance, John still cannot manage his tasks without hand-holding.

The entire team is so frustrated after nearly a year of tolerating his inability to complete tasks. Along with that, he has a nasty attitude towards his colleagues who ask him to manage something simple or a project with an immediate deadline. My CEO, who is a very fair and nice guy, decided to have John report to him temporarily to defuse things. Was everyone thrilled? At first yes, because everyone felt he would finally perform and manage his tasks. But John dismissed requests from his colleagues and gaslights them at every turn, because he feels untouchable now that he’s reporting to the CEO. Going to HR proved useless, and employees are stressed out over the CEO’s failure to see John’s incompetence and nasty attitude. In addition, John is unprofessional and has divulged giving work to friends outside the company to assist him with tasks, which is a violation of policy. The CEO knows about John’s behavior, but says other colleagues thinks he’s doing fine and he and HR have no complaints. John had several crying bouts with our CEO and is a pathological liar. Somehow our CEO fell for this. When our CEO travels, which is often, John’s demeanor changes from acting angelic to a nasty tyrant.

This has truly frustrated the team, and John doesn’t care since he knows he’s liked by the CEO and our HR business partner. How can we get our CEO to see that John is a total slacker, pathological liar, and sucking the life out of his colleagues? We have proven and provided details to our CEO to no avail. Nothing on John’s resume about his experience is lining up. Our CEO doesn’t seem to want to get rid of him, even though his contract is coming up in June for renewal.

If you’ve already laid out the case in detail to your CEO, including John’s lies about his background, I don’t know that there’s more you can do. It’s possible that if you can catch him in violation of a very clear black-and-white policy that your CEO cares about personally, that could do it … or you can try presenting a steady drumbeat of every problem John causes … but if your CEO already knows everything in your letter and doesn’t care, you might be out of options. In some companies, key people on your team could simply refuse to work with John and that would bring the problem to a head, but in others that would backfire on them, not John. If people the CEO values start leaving over it, that might finally get some traction … but even that might not.

I will say that, like yesterday’s letter-writer, it sounds like you let the problems with John continue way too long. If he was reporting to you for almost a year before he transferred to the CEO, ideally you would have acted to let him go much, much earlier. At this point, the reality is that it might be out of your hands.

2. Coworker on extended sick leave comes in to use our sports facility

I have a question about colleagues who are out on sick leave who continue to come on-site to use our employer’s sports facilities.

I work on a site that has a sports center attached to it; staff have to pay a monthly fee to join, like any gym membership. Recently my colleague, Delilah, who has been out for several months on extended sick leave, has been spotted coming in to play tennis over the lunch hour. The colleagues are unimpressed, which I can understand because since some of them are covering her workload, and are complaining behind her back, including to management. This could make it harder for Delilah when she comes back to work and rejoins her team.

But I can also understand that for this colleague, coming in to get some exercise and contact with other people might be beneficial to her recovery and overall well-being. Should someone say something to Delilah, and if so, what?

First, it’s totally possible for someone to legitimately need an extended sick leave but still be able to play tennis. It could even be something suggested by her doctor, for all we know! But not everyone understands that, which is why the optics of doing at it her workplace are not great. It’s unsurprising that people are talking about it.

Just on a human level, it would be a kindness for someone to point that out to Delilah … but if I were her manager, that’s not a conversation I’d go anywhere near because it could easily end up sounding discriminatory. (I would, though, try to shut down the complaints from other employees.)

3. Can I ask for a higher salary because I’ll need to buy a car?

I live in Los Angeles and have never owned a car in the ten years I’ve been here. Previously I have just avoided interviewing for jobs that would be too difficult to commute to, and it’s never been easier than in my remote positions for the last few years. I’m actively job hunting now and everywhere I’ve interviewed has had a hybrid in-office model, if not totally mandatory in-office.

I’m not opposed to finally taking the plunge and buying a car, but is it reasonable to negotiate that when the salaries are already listed in job postings? Interviews have all asked if I have a problem working in office and I always say it won’t be a problem without getting into the specifics, but I don’t know it’s reasonable to make a point out of asking higher than the listed salary range if they’re expecting a commute from me. I don’t want to become a non-option by being a squeaky wheel about this in interviews too early. When should I bring it up and is it even a useful bargaining tool in a city where everyone is expected to already own a car?

Yeah, needing to buy a car isn’t something you can include in your salary negotiation. Salaries are supposed to be based on market rate and what the job is worth to the employer, not on applicants’ personal expenses. You can factor it into your own thinking about what salary you’d need to take a particular job, but it shouldn’t be a point you raise when negotiating.

4. I was promised a three-month salary review but no one’s brought it up

I started a new job in January. In the final interview, they asked what salary I was looking for and I said X amount, which was genuinely the number I was hoping for. A few hours later, I was offered the job over the phone with pay of X amount + a few thousand. Great! I was also told they expected I would do really well at this company, and after three months, they could bump me up to X amount + 6,000. This number is far beyond what I thought I would be making at this stage in my career, although it is in the general range I’ve seen other people in my position at other companies making. I also have this in writing. Specifically, “We will review you in about three months to see about a bump.”

The three-month mark was in April, and no one has brought up a performance review. I feel very well liked and successful in this position, although I don’t have anything concrete to show for my time (which is very common in this position in this industry for this time frame). I would love more money! I feel okay right now, but more is always better. At what point do I bring this up, and what do I say? Does it matter that although I’ve received a lot of praise, I haven’t necessarily made the company X amount of dollars yet? I’m feeling slight imposter syndrome when it comes to asking for this amount of money.

They promised they’d review your salary in three months, and it’s been longer than three months. It’s completely reasonable to bring this up — in fact, if I were your manager and this had somehow slipped my mind, I’d be dismayed if I realized months later that you had never brought it up with me! You can just say this: “When I was hired, my offer letter said that after three months we’d look at bumping my salary to $X. Is that a conversation we can have now?”

5. Asking a laid-off coworker for a reference

I’ve been looking for a new job for several months now, after our billionth reorg. It was slow going for a while, but I recently tweaked my resume and am getting a lot of traction. Phone screens are coming in, and I have two in person interviews next week.

While this was happening, my company had yet another reorg, this time with layoffs. The person I work most closely with was laid off. I was not. I would really like to ask him to be a reference when things progress that far, but I’m worried that it would be indelicate or rude to reach out when I know he’s struggling. What’s the etiquette around asking for references from a coworker who was just laid off?

It’s normally fine to do! If anything, he’s likely to appreciate that you could be a reference for him as well (or that you could end up in a job where you could potentially help with leads or contacts or so forth).

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Various houseplants in a shrimp pan sauce

The bottom half of a mouse with pizza grease

Rubber bands and hair ties in whole milk

Raw chicken juice reduction, from garbage

Window condensation, fish tank water, and one piece of kibble

Something crunchy we found on the floor at 3:00 a.m.

Whatever it is that the people eat

House flies and tuna au jus

Prescription food for a cat that isn’t you

One bite of a giant loaf of bread

Wooden table corners

The top half of a mouse, gently shredded

The cream cheese off a bagel

Moth

People skin after they just worked out

Plastic bag in gelatin and fish aspic

Sour cream and ground beef from a Taco Bell nacho bowl

Preprocessed dry kibble (vomited up by another cat)

Just gravy

Somehow even wetter gravy

A teaspoon of each of the six assorted traditional flavors of regular cat food

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the role of AI and copyright, with much of it focused on fretting by various copyright maximalists about how things created by AI need more copyright or how AI systems are violating the copyright of artists, both of which seem to be fairly questionable claims at best.

But, copyright law professor Brian Frye recently participated in a Copyright Office “listening session” regarding copyright and AI, and he suggested an entirely different way that everyone (including the Copyright Office) should be thinking about. As he notes, the questions everyone seems to be fretting about appear to be easily answered:

I think we are asking the wrong questions about AI and copyright. Everyone is asking whether copyright protects AI-generated works and whether training an AI algorithm infringes copyright. The obvious answer is no and no.

Copyright only protects works created by people. AI doesn’t even create works, it generates content, which we consumers interpret as works. Roland Barthes predicted the death of the author, and AI has written the author’s obituary.

Likewise, training an AI algorithm doesn’t and shouldn’t infringe copyright. AI algorithms don’t copy works, they merely catalog rhetorical conventions and then deploy them to create conventional content.

Instead, he notes, everyone is missing the much bigger picture in that we could be (and arguably should be) using AI to tell us which other works (of the ones created by humans) even have enough creativity to deserve copyright protection in the first place:

We should be asking what AI can tell us about what copyright should protect and why. Copyright can only protect “creative” works. But courts and the Copyright Office have struggled to define “creativity.” Maybe AI can help?

An AI algorithm is essentially a nonsense generator, designed to produce banalities. In other words, AI is uncreative by design. An AI algorithm is a machine for regurgitating conventional wisdom. Indeed, we are amused when an AI “hallucinates” and fails to satisfy our pedestrian expectations.

But we can be just as boring as any AI. And there’s no point in copyright protecting banalities. Maybe AI can help us limit copyright to works that are actually creative. It’s easy, just ask AI to evaluate the “creativity” of works produced by people, to determine whether they deserve copyright. No one knows a fake like a faker, and AI is designed to identify banality. That’s what makes it a killer app.

We don’t know how to identify creativity. But AI can tell us what isn’t creative. Maybe that’s good enough to tell us what is creative, if anything.

Of course, the likelihood of this happening is basically nil, but it’s still a point worth thinking about. In the copyright world, there have long been arguments over what counts as being creative enough to get copyright’s protections. This may have been most notable in the realm of photography, where some (somewhat reasonably!) argued that the photographer, especially in outdoors/landscape photography, was merely capturing a scene created by nature, and therefore had little, if any, creative input into it.

The courts have generally side stepped this issue by arguing that the photographer gets copyright on the artistic decisions in terms of things like “where to point the camera” and “how to frame the photograph.” But that’s often felt like a cop out.

It’s intriguing to think of AI in a different way, as a much more impartial observer of whatever works are seeking copyright, with the ability to say whether or not a give work has the requisite creativity to get copyright. It may seem like a silly (or even trollish) suggestion, but it’s difficult to argue it’s any worse than how things are currently done.

This week I upgraded my home internet service to 10 Gbps, and not because I needed faster speeds, but because it was simply cheaper than my existing 400 Mbps service. A 25x speed improvement for less money? Yes I’ll take that, thank you! This upgrade started me thinking about how much computer technology has improved over the decades. When I was a kid, I often thought that the most interesting period of technological advancement was 50 or 100 years in the past: when a person could be born into a world of horse-powered transportation and telegraphs, and retire in an era of intercontinental air travel and satellite communications. Yet the changes during my lifetime, when measured as order of magnitude improvements, have been equally amazing.

 
Processor Speeds – 6000 times faster, about 4 orders of magnitude

The first computer I ever got my hands on was my elementary school’s Apple II, with a 1 MHz 6502 CPU. Compare that to Intel’s Core i9-13900KS, which runs at 6.0 GHz without overclocking, for a nice 6000-fold improvement in clock speed.

Raw GHz (or MHz) is a weak measure of CPU performance, of course. Compared to the 6502 CPU, that Intel i9 has much wider registers, more registers, more complex instructions, superscalar instruction execution, hyperthreading, multiple execution cores, and other fantastic goodies that the MOS designers could scarcely have dreamed of. I’m not sure if there’s any meaningful benchmark that could directly compare these two processors’ performance but it would be an entertaining match-up.

As impressive as a 6000x improvement may be, it’s nothing compared to the improvements in other computer specs.

 
Main Memory – 1.4 million times larger, about 6 orders of magnitude

In 1983 my family purchased an Atari 800 home computer, with a huge-for-the-time 48 KB of RAM. What’s the modern comparison? Maybe this pre-built gaming PC with 64 GB of RAM? That’s more than a million times larger RAM capacity than my old Atari system, but it’s not even very impressive by today’s standards. Windows 10 Pro theoretically supports up to 2 TB of RAM.

 
Communication Bandwidth – 33 million times faster, about 7 orders of magnitude

Who doesn’t love a 300 bps modem? It was good enough for getting that Atari system communicating with the wider world, connecting to BBS systems and downloading software. But today’s communication technologies are so much faster, it makes my head spin. What am I ever going to do with 10 Gbps internet service… stream 200 simultaneous 4K videos? Download all of Wikipedia, ten thousand times every day?

To put this in perspective, the amount of data that I can now download in one minute would have needed 68 years with that Atari modem.

 
External Storage – 182 million times larger, about 8 orders of magnitude

Over the past few decades, the champion of computer spec improvements has undoubtedly been external storage. My Atari 1050 floppy drive supported “enhanced density” floppy disks with 130 KB of data. While that seemed capacious at the time, today a quick Amazon search will turn up standard consumer hard drives with 22 TB storage capacity, for a mind-bending improvement of 182 million times over that floppy disk.

If you’re a vintage computer collector or a BMOW Floppy Emu user, then you’re probably familiar with the fact that the entire library of every Apple II or classic Mac program ever made could fit on a single SD memory card today.

 
Hardware and Software Cost – 0 orders of magnitude

Despite all these million-fold improvements in computer performance, hardware today still costs about the same as it did 40-some years ago when that Atari system was new. The Atari 800’s launch price in 1979 was $999.95, roughly the same price you’ll pay for a decent Mac or Windows laptop today. The Apple II launched at $1298 in 1977, and the first Macintosh cost $2495 in 1984. In real dollar terms (adjusted for inflation), the cost of computer hardware has actually fallen substantially even while it’s improved a million-fold. That first Macintosh system’s cost is equivalent to $7428 in today’s dollars.

Software prices have also barely budged since the 8-bit days. The first version of VisiCalc (1979) was priced at $100, and today Microsoft Excel is $159. As a kid I mowed lawns to earn enough money to buy $40 Atari and Nintendo games, and today a kid can buy PS5 or Nintendo Switch games for $40. Why? I can’t buy a cheeseburger or a car or a house for 1983 prices, but I can buy the latest installment of the Mario game series for the same price as the original one?

 
Looking Ahead

If there’s anything I’ve learned from the past, it’s that I stink at predicting the future. Nevertheless, it’s fun to extrapolate the trends of the past 40 years and imagine the computers of 2063, if I’m fortunate enough to live to see them. 40 years from now I look forward to owning a home computer sporting a 36 THz CPU, with 90 petabytes of RAM, a 330 petabyte/sec internet connection, and 3 zettabytes of storage space, which I’ll purchase for $1000.

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