Washington Post journalist Will Oremus reports that it advanced out of the House Energy & Commerce Committee today after a Republican majority rejected amendments proposed to mitigate its significant speech problems. It now awaits a vote on the House floor.
It’s one of numerous bills being taken up by the House Energy & Commerce Committee starting at 10AM ET — a well-intentioned proposal that, as I wrote last month and discussed on Decoder, is a dead end for fighting nonconsensual sexual imagery and a threat to free speech. Fight for the Future is currently running a petition against it and has a tool for finding your representative (if you live in the US) too.
Kottke directed me toward a website posing a question I have never, ever asked myself: which of two chickens is more frolicsome? Which is more optimistic? More aberrant? Creator Erika Hall will take suggestions for new adjectives, too.
[clickens.chicken.pics]
Whatever the opposite of coolhunting is, Max Read’s analytical prediction of an accursed new internet trend does it:
The high-alpha nature of committed, political “smoking is actually good” arguments, combined with existing coalitions for developing annoyance at people with public-health masters degrees into ideological position, is likely to create a solid pro-smoking bloc, especially as we enter summer and face down a fertile period for stupid discourse.
[maxread.substack.com]
The Body Scout author Lincoln Michel has a thoughtful literary analysis of Sam Altman’s AI-written “metafictional literary short story” — which, like a lot of AI text, scans well without exactly adding up:
“I haven’t actually seen anyone praise the story as a story. No one is lauding the memorable characters or marveling at the vivid setting. Instead, the praise has focused on “good lines.” The purple prose. And the prose is the worst part.”
[countercraft.substack.com]
Verge emigrant Cameron Faulkner has a fitting paean to Half-Life: Alyx, on its fifth anniversary still one of VR’s best games:
“It was a huge gamble to release the long-awaited prequel to one of the most influential games in virtual reality, requiring hardware that very few had then, and still very few have today. To that end, every developer making VR games is knowingly making a huge gamble that may not pan out in their favor.”
Molly White’s newsletter cogently outlines problems with how both AI companies and open access creators are approaching copyright, plus some possible solutions:
“The true threat from AI models training on open access material is not that more people may access knowledge thanks to new modalities. It’s that those models may stifle Wikipedia and other free knowledge repositories, benefiting from the labor, money, and care that goes into supporting them while also bleeding them dry.”
[citationneeded.news]
