The fact that they a.) copied the artists work without permission, and b.) it negatively affects the artists' ability to profit from their work.

What everyone seems to miss is that there are already artists whose works have been so convincingly copied by AI that they're being accused of using AI for their own work! They have been banned for submitting "AI" generated works because the AI generator output matches their originals so well.

The difference between AI and traditional artists is that traditional artists, generally speaking, cannot create an (comparatively) unlimited number of works in another artist's style, and that most artists strive to be different from other artists to the extent that saying, "Your work reminds me of [another artist]" is usually taken as a backhanded compliment. Artists in general have ethics, and AI doesn't.

To someone trained in the visual arts, AI feels like trying to finger paint with mittens on.

The issue is that it's far more work to get the AI to produce specifically what the artist had in mind than to just paint it himself. For most artists, reproducing a particular style is the easy part; the difficult part is the inspiration, i.e. figuring out what we should paint.

The social cost of Windows past inability to open tar files is that millions of Fox viewers don't believe in global climate change, even though the temperature data is freely available, because it is provided as tar archives.

Prior to the 2000's, Republicans routinely courted the environmental movement. I remember when GH Bush said he wanted to be the environmental President. But with the widespread adoption of Windows on PCs, the majority of upper-middle class people were no longer logging into UNIX terminals, but instead using their personal devices which could no longer open the most widely used file archive format of scientists, engineers, and intellectuals. And the Republican party shifted from a party focused on long-term, sustainable, solutions to one focused on gut-feeling anti-intellectualism (i.e. distrust of experts) and greed. A trend which was reinforced by the Windows paradigm of deliberately hiding the complexity of computers and encouraging them not to think.

Now the reasons for the shifting of political winds are certainly complex. But I can't help but believe that a part of this shift is due in part to Microsoft deliberately dumbing down computers to the extent they hindered effective communication between experts and the general public. The experts were sequestered behind UNIX workstations, and the rest of the population was dumbed down by Windows PCs.

I remember when opening tar files on Windows involved installing cygwin first.

I suppose it's better late than never, but it's been nearly three decades after Windows 95 came out, and most of us have already moved on to Linux or some other POSIX compliant OS.

When I wanted to know if global climate change was real, the data came in tarfiles.

When I wanted to know if masks really worked, I had to extract the data from a tarfile.

I could go to the primary sources of information, and become better informed, precisely because I was using a POSIX compliant OS that could open tar files.

Now, I'm not saying that this is going to undo the 2016 election, or stop the MAGA chants, or even wake up Joe Biden, but at least those Windows users who want to leave their ideological bubble and join the worldwide community of intellectuals and scientists will now be able to do so.

What DeviantArt, etc... did was certainly unethical, regardless of the legality. They violated the trust of their users to build a product which won't benefit artists, and won't produce copyrightable work.

But I remember when the filesharing lawsuits were going on that the RIAA and MPAA were prevailing in lawsuits even when they couldn't prove that copying had occurred. Making available copyrighted works was enough to get a verdict.

Now, DeviantArt and Midjourney aren't even denying they copied the works in question, but rather, have managed to get the case dismissed regardless.

I suspect that if Midjourney or DA AI was used to create almost-identical copies of Snow White, or similar Hollywood Blockbuster, we'd see a much different outcome.

It's interesting that Google distinguishes itself among software developers by paying others - rather than being paid by them - to use its software.

If you really were the best search engine, wouldn't you be able to charge others for the service?

The first three you mentioned are key parts of Ted Kaczinsky's manifesto. All of these existed prior to AI, and with respect to class stratification and economics, existed to a far greater degree in the past than today.

As for the military: AI does improve things a bit by being able to differentiate friend from foe with much greater accuracy. Instead of carpet bombing an entire village, the military would now have the option of dropping a single grenade on the terrorist. But in case you were wondering, it is unlikely that any government would place regulatory restrictions on their own use of AI in the military. Currently, even military aircraft do not have to pass FAA certification, because safety features which would save lives in a civilian context can impair combat effectiveness.

Norway is a great example of Leftist hypocrisy: while propping up their economy by selling North Sea oil and gas to other nations, they ban ICE cars in their own country. If every other country in the EU followed suit, Norwegians wouldn't be able to afford electric cars. They would, however, still have cheap oil and gas.

What - aside from Ted Kaczinsky-esque conspiracy theories - does AI pose to the general public?

I've never heard of any real reason, any real danger posed by AI that regulation would alleviate.

OTOH, the fact that anyone with a computer science degree and enough spare change to buy a GPU can leverage the power of AI models is very threatening to Google's profit margins. Why use Google for advertising if your in-house AI can figure out - with a very high degree of precision - who will and won't buy your product?

That's what I'm wondering, and why this whole thing sounds so surreal. It's almost as if government is exercising power for its own sake, rather than to achieve a social good.

But FB is already renown for censoring that content. If anything, the only ideas they allow are liberal, which makes it odd that California would consider the promotion of Leftist ideals as "unsafe for children".

And they've gone overboard in crafting a platform in which any intelligent discourse suitable for adults is already considered "unsafe". To include art which doesn't include actual nudity, but suggests it. Including abstract forms which could be seen as figures.

Are ideas so dangerous now that our youth must be shielded from them? And is it now possible to place a dollar value on the harm caused by dangerous ideas?

Odd, how the government is starting to sound much like the medieval church, but without any claim to moral authority at all.

It is distinctly different from a god of the gaps argument which argues that because there is some gap in knowledge that god must have done it. I instead argue that a process which produces ever increasing complexity will inevitably produce God, given enough time.

While your dog might think of you as a god, the analogy fails to become meaningful because we humans can only reason about those things which we can define. Internet debates about the existence of God often end up floundering because opposing sides can't come to a common understanding or definition of what they're arguing about. If we confine the notion of god to an all-powerful, all-knowing being - at least from the standpoint of human comprehension - we avoid senseless debates about rational impossibilities.

And if what these scientists are arguing is correct, then it follows rationally that an all-powerful, all-knowing being must exist. Because the arguments justifying evolution place no upper bound on the complexity or the time required to make it happen. That is, there is no animal of which a biologist would ever say, "This is so complex evolution couldn't possibly have created it..."

And you haven't fully defined what you mean by the energy curve being asymptotic and limiting the duration of the habitat, so I can't respond to that. But if we hold to the same assumptions made by evolutionary scientists, Michael Behe notwithstanding, there's no reason that any habitat would preclude some form of evolution.

but that mug of crystals is never going to take over my kitchen and become a deity no matter how long it sits there.

Kind of like how pools of primordial amino acids will never evolve into living cells no matter how long they sit there?

The fundamental problem evolution presents is that if it is true, then there must exist (statistically speaking) beings with 13 billion years more of evolution than we currently possess. The difference between them and us, even if only a purely technological one, would be indistinguishable from an all-powerful deity.

If OTOH, time regresses infinitely into the past, then,

1. If it is possible that an all powerful being could exist, then an all powerful being must exist, because
2. any probability, however small, becomes a certainty with an infinity of chances, and,
3. once an all powerful being exists, it cannot be destroyed except by its own willingness to not exist anymore.

Thus, atheists are keen to prove that God could not logically exist, because if it is possible for God to exist, He must exist, based on what we know about time and probability.

It holds that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity and complexity.

If this is indeed true, then an all-powerful God must certainly exist. Even if he had to evolve from simpler elements.