The Economy of Self Ingestion and Digital Replica Management

The self-replicate never sounded so good. 

Senate’s NO FAKES act hopes to make unauthorized “digital replicas” illegal

Aug 2024, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/08/senates-no-fakes-act-hopes-to-make-unauthorized-digital-replicas-illegal/

Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act of 2024. [link]

The NO FAKES Act would create legal recourse for people whose digital representations are created without consent. It would hold both individuals and companies liable for producing, hosting, or sharing these unauthorized digital replicas, including those created by generative AI. Due to generative AI technology that has become mainstream in the past two years, creating audio or image media fakes of people has become fairly trivial, with easy photorealistic video replicas likely next to arrive.

To protect a person's digital likeness, the NO FAKES Act introduces a "digital replication right" that gives individuals exclusive control over the use of their voice or visual likeness in digital replicas. This right extends 10 years after death, with possible five-year extensions if actively used. It can be licensed during life and inherited after death, lasting up to 70 years after an individual's death. Along the way, the bill defines what it considers to be a "digital replica":

DIGITAL REPLICA - The term "digital replica" means a newly created, computer-generated, highly realistic electronic representation that is readily identifiable as the voice or visual likeness of an individual that - (A) is embodied in a sound recording, image, audiovisual work, including an audiovisual work that does not have any accompanying sounds, or transmission - (i) in which the actual individual did not actually perform or appear; or (ii) that is a version of a sound recording, image, or audiovisual work in which the actual individual did perform or appear, in which the fundamental character of the performance or appearance has been materially altered; and (B) does not include the electronic reproduction, use of a sample of one sound recording or audiovisual work into another, remixing, mastering, or digital remastering of a sound recording or audiovisual work authorized by the copyright holder.

Image credit: AI Art - Holding Hands 2 - 2023

Post Script:

Digital twin method can boost wireless network speed and reliability

Jul 2024, phys.org and written by Matt Shipman the original

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-07-digital-twin-method-boost-wireless.html

"Systems can't put everything in edge caches, and storing too much redundant data on an edge server can slow down the server if the data are using too many computational resources. As a result, systems are constantly making decisions about which data packages to store and which data packages can be evicted.

The new edge caching optimization method, called D-REC, uses a digital twin to take real-time data from the wireless network and uses it to conduct simulations to predict which data are most likely to be requested by users. These predictions are then sent back to the network to inform the network's edge caching decisions. Because the simulations are performed by a computer that is outside of the network, this does not slow down network performance.

via North Carolina State University: Zifan Zhang et al, Digital Twin-Assisted Data-Driven Optimization for Reliable Edge Caching in Wireless Networks, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1109/JSAC.2024.3431575

https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/JSAC.2024.3431575

On the Depths of Cultural Appropriation

An influential person from 1700's Sweden spent a lot of time in Turkey, got real into their meatballs, and brought them home to his otherwise culinary wasteland (jk) where they got immediately culturally appropriated into Swedish Meatballs.

Hundreds of years later, after America culturally appropriated the shit out of Sweden via IKEA, we all totally forgot about Turkey's meatballs, and gave Sweden all the credit. After all, why wouldn't the meatballs be theirs? They came up with the idea of assemmling furniture for f's sake. (Yes, I made 'assembling' look like a Swedish word on purpose.)

There was this thing happening in 2017-2018 where cultural identity became so fractured that we couldn't tell who was allowed to do what anymore. I think it's still happening.

When I go to a Black Panther movie, I'm not allowed to wear a dashiki unless I am from Africa; I mean unless my family is from Africa. Or unless I am white but adopted by parents of African heritage, in which case I identify as black (although since mostly nobody else identifies me that way because of the color of my skin it doesn't matter what I think).

Or unless my adopted child is from Africa which gives me right by association (I'm not even sure this counts). Unless you can't tell that I adopted my child from Africa because I didn't bring them with me to the movies because I was afraid people would think I culturally appropriated their kids.

What if you visited Africa and were given that dashiki from an artisan in the family with which you stayed while you lived there for three months building a school for the local community? Still no dashiki? What if you married the daughter of that artisan and had children with her? Still?

What if the movie was inspired, produced, promulgated and viewed (i.e. financially supported) by a culture other than the one being represented? Is Hollywood culture, or Superhero culture being inappropriately appropriated in this case? Or are these not cultures but only cultural byproducts, cultural artifacts?

Cultural artifacts are protected under intellectual property law, as long as they aren't fashion or fragrance (with the exception of Play-Doh, true, and maybe Vibrams but I doubt anyone is appropriating that...Crocs too). But these protections are held by individuals, not populations.

Dogon Couple, from the MET, NYC

Can an entire population own a cultural product, like Superman or the Iliad, or the Dogon Couple?

I am pretty sure it has to do with the unequal distribution of power and who is appropriating who. Anyone can rip off the Iliad because it is a cornerstone of Western culture, which is a cornerstone of Global culture (if there is such a thing).

And the main question is - how does Africa eventually take over the world if people aren't allowed to consume and participate in its culture?

Notes

'My whole life has been a lie': Sweden admits meatballs are Turkish
May 2018, The Guardian

Post Script

I had a dream once, and do still, that as the Arab world (or at least Saudi Arabia) begins to diversify its economy to incorporate entertainment, it begins to absorb hip hop artists from the West. The affinity between some hip hop artists who may be Muslim (more likely than country singer pop stars) and the uber-duper rich Saudis create a new class of global elite men and women of African heritage x America x Islam, who eventually take over the world in ways today's Western folks can't even imagine.

Post Post Script

In a way not much at all related, we wonder if this is really about identity theft-anxiety in the aftermath of a post-Equifax, post-Ashley Madison world where everyone has had their personal identity (not their cultural identity) stolen.

Also this, let's not forget.