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The Enjoyment Purpose

The enjoyment purpose. Do exceptions under the copyright laws of Japan & Singapore allow GenAI training? TLDR: Not really… The latest issue of the AI Copyright Newsletter

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The problem is not the power of the AI, it’s the power of our brains

My AI was making me angry. I had trained up a chatbot on the Character.ai website, in the personality and style of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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Good AIs copy, great AIs steal

untangling the copyright status of foundation models I presented this paper in mid-October 2022 to the annual conference of the Asian Pacific Copyright Association (the candid shot above is by Vincent Nghai; I’m the blur one!

January 3, 2023

Displacing Singapore

I wrote this essay in 1998, for a volume of photographs by Lucas Jodogne, titled Singapore: Views on the Urban Landscape. Lucas’ photographs were marvelous, a sort of warm version of the New Topographics.

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Foundation models and copyright

I’ve recently started a newsletter — imaginatively titled AI and Copyright, with the goal of tracking the shifting legal picture around the copyright status of the Foundation Models, including the Large Language Models (LLMs), and their cousins the image- (and video- and 3D-) generating models like DALL-E2.

May 16, 2022

Marjorie Doggett - in three histories...

…or four really, since it is also a story of Singapore publishing… this based on a short speech I made at the launch of Marjorie Doggett’s Singapore: a Photographic Record, published by the Photographic Heritage Foundation, Hong Kong, with NUS Press, and supported by the Ng Teng Fong Charitable Foundation.

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the Merlion and other monsters

As an invented symbol, apparently born fully-grown from the head of an ichthyologist, the Merlion is most fully a monster, with its mixed charge of fear and attraction, for Singapore’s poets.

December 20, 2020

The Singapore Public Art Database

A new iteration of the database of public art in Singapore, at PSMedia.Asia/publicartsg One slow-burn project of mine over the last twenty years has been documenting public art in Singapore.

September 12, 2020

modern Buddhist murals

The Isipathanaramaya murals The Isipathanaramaya is a Theravada Buddhist temple in a prosperous early 20th century suburb of the Sri Lankan capital city, Colombo. It was commissioned in 1916, by Colombo merchant D.

December 3, 2019

Singapore's national AI strategy takes aim at curriculum

Singapore has just announced its national AI strategy, comprising a series of ecosystem-strengthening moves, and major national projects in five key areas, one of which is right in the book publishing wheelhouse: education.