Larry Ahern

@SenAdamSchiff Your job isn’t to report the news, it’s to lead. Tell me what you’re doing to stop them and how we can help (and stop emailing us asking for money).

If you thought Donald Trump and Elon Musk weren't going to go after your Social Security – you thought wrong. They already are. Here's what's happening:

Wow, this even caught me off guard for a minute! Publisher referrals and outreach appreciated.

@damgentemp Crazy!

Apparently, Italian TV network RTV38 decided to not only lift the music theme but also make a whole intro to one of their "shows" parodying the intro to Curse of Monkey Island.

@JimShull “Dark Universe at Universal Epic Universe”? Seems like they could have tried using a few less “universes” in the title, don’t you think? (The land looks cool though).

During my 40 years in theme parks as a designer I would give notes on all my projects. With #DarkUniverse I have no notes. It’s perfect. #EpicUniverse

@ramon_wilhelm Thanks!

It's still #LucasArtsMonth, but today is the Birthday of a LucasArts legend! Happy Birthday, @larry_ahern! 🎂🎈🎁🎊🥳 Hope you feel like you could... take on this cake!

Also, when did editing posts cost money on this crap platform? Thanks, Elon. Had to delete and repost because of a typo.

Holy crap, this courtroom sketch artist is insanely talented. Did Trump bring in a ringer because he didn’t like how he’s usually portrayed in court?

@robjyeo Looks really fun, Rob!

@austinkleon Well, I heard pixelated tattoos are back in style again, so this is actually very timely.

@larry_ahern Haha better late than never. Full Throttle and DOTT were formative games for pre-teen me

I never realized the interface in Full Throttle is also the biker gang's tattoo

@SCRTX98 I actually like Hondo as a character (his personality, though not so much his visual design). But some of us thought a character or alien species familiar to original trilogy fans might have the greatest impact here.

@larry_ahern Hondo was a perfect choice. Galaxy's Edge was originally focused toward Star Wars fans. That area was supposed to immerse you. The app introduced you to Hondo as well. People don't use any of those things now They don't actually experience the area. They ride, they leave

Although this animated figure is impressive in its movements I have zero idea who it is or why it is important. Good storytelling requires fore knowledge of stories and characters for a ride or experience to succeed. #StarWars

@Figment_Jedi @JimShull Which just means we didn’t have the clout Filoni has.

@larry_ahern @JimShull But Carbonite Freezing was used in Clone Wars as a way to infiltrate a prison for a rescue mission lead by Anakin himself.

@nixice @JimShull Yeah, it lengthened the time but we kept the Hutt lines short and guests came in mid scene. It worked and the guy getting frozen was more of a comical screwup to lighten it up a little. But you were working for a bad guy. Otoh, Hondo is questionable himself.

@larry_ahern @JimShull Sounds like a little too much character disassociation though, to have both a character and a translator speak in the quick ride setup queue? The Hutt would mostly be mime and noise, but still, translating almost doubles the talk time and splits the character focus.

@JimShull The Hutt (via droid translator) berated another pilot for failing him, then froze him in carbonite to show guests what’s in store for them if they screw up. Lucasfilm nixed it because carbonite freezing was an improvised approach unique to Cloud City (and they’re no fun).

@JimShull Our first version of the preshow featured a Hutt instead. It technically wasn’t Jabba, but it would have felt familiar and I think people would have liked it better (plus it probably would have been cheaper).

I’ve resigned from my role leading the Audio team at Stability AI, because I don’t agree with the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is ‘fair use’. First off, I want to say that there are lots of people at Stability who are deeply thoughtful about these issues. I’m proud that we were able to launch a state-of-the-art AI music generation product trained on licensed training data, sharing the revenue from the model with rights-holders. I’m grateful to my many colleagues who worked on this with me and who supported our team, and particularly to Emad for giving us the opportunity to build and ship it. I’m thankful for my time at Stability, and in many ways I think they take a more nuanced view on this topic than some of their competitors. But, despite this, I wasn’t able to change the prevailing opinion on fair use at the company. This was made clear when the US Copyright Office recently invited public comments on generative AI and copyright, and Stability was one of many AI companies to respond. Stability’s 23-page submission included this on its opening page: “We believe that Al development is an acceptable, transformative, and socially-beneficial use of existing content that is protected by fair use”. For those unfamiliar with ‘fair use’, this claims that training an AI model on copyrighted works doesn’t infringe the copyright in those works, so it can be done without permission, and without payment. This is a position that is fairly standard across many of the large generative AI companies, and other big tech companies building these models — it’s far from a view that is unique to Stability. But it’s a position I disagree with. I disagree because one of the factors affecting whether the act of copying is fair use, according to Congress, is “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”. Today’s generative AI models can clearly be used to create works that compete with the copyrighted works they are trained on. So I don’t see how using copyrighted works to train generative AI models of this nature can be considered fair use. But setting aside the fair use argument for a moment — since ‘fair use’ wasn’t designed with generative AI in mind — training generative AI models in this way is, to me, wrong. Companies worth billions of dollars are, without permission, training generative AI models on creators’ works, which are then being used to create new content that in many cases can compete with the original works. I don’t see how this can be acceptable in a society that has set up the economics of the creative arts such that creators rely on copyright. To be clear, I’m a supporter of generative AI. It will have many benefits — that’s why I’ve worked on it for 13 years. But I can only support generative AI that doesn’t exploit creators by training models — which may replace them — on their work without permission. I’m sure I’m not the only person inside these generative AI companies who doesn’t think the claim of ‘fair use’ is fair to creators. I hope others will speak up, either internally or in public, so that companies realise that exploiting creators can’t be the long-term solution in generative AI.

@darcyauthor I see a new marketing idea brewing: write a book about the Cross-stitch Killer, then bundle it with a cross-stitch pattern book of all the victims!

Saw this featured at my local library and I have never wanted anything quite so badly.

@bobservo @TimOfLegend I want one of those tentacle guns!

thanks again to @TimOfLegend and @larry_ahern for their contributions!

posing with my first book child outside of the @BossFightBooks booth at @RetroGamingExpo

@DanPovenmire Awesome!

#doofenshmirtz has arrived!

@ImaJunation @TimOfLegend @phrenopolis These are great!