This is uselessly metaphysical.

If Meta bought all the books they trained their AI on, it seems to me they should be allowed to do that. If you've purchased a copy of a book, you're allowed to analyze it with a computer.

Seems like it'd be a huge cost savings. And frankly, AI is more ethical than a sociopath, so it's a win-win.

...through fear-mongering and telling congress that people shouldn't have access to AI that OpenAI doesn't control.

I figured someone would bring up the myth of "the myth of talent". The art community is the absolute worst about this. To be good at art, you need both innate talent and practice. People who have that innate talent think that practice will get everyone there -- believe me, it doesn't. The reason you think it does is because of survivorship bias. Nobody asks me how I got to not be able to do anything art-wise except create copies of what I can see, so they don't ever find out that I practiced for decades and didn't get anywhere.

As it is, computers and programming are my skill, so I'm using that skill to generate art. Anybody who whines about me doing it that way is gatekeeping.

These sorts of theatrics exactly.

...not because it does.

It's all about gatekeeping the skill, time, and budget floor and propping up the wall between "producers" and "consumers". I worked hard to get where I am, therefore it shouldn't be made easier. I worked hard to make $20/hour, therefore we shouldn't raise the minimum wage. Etc.

The reason there aren't legions and legions of programmers protesting AI on twitter is because programmers are accustomed to change and we've learned to embrace it, yet every time there's a technology that changes how art is made (cameras, digital painting, 3d rendering, even pre-made pigments), there are a group of artists who flip their shit and say that the new technology is going to kill creativity and ruin art as we know it, then fifty years later all of the things that those people insisted are "not art" are in museums and art history books.

I hope a company in China gets ahold of the database and trains a good music generator AI on it and releases it for free.

Smart devices have been spying on you for years now. Don't buy a fridge that spies on you.

"The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me,"

Mindblowing is that companies make all the claims about AI that are 100% unfounded. "generate any image/video"... No it can't. "fluent conversation"... Unless I have to constantly remind it about the thing it said two prompts ago that it forgot. And I PAY for AI access.

It's not anywhere near impressive. It's a party trick at best and dangerously misleading at worst.

...who for some reason deserve to be protected from automation more than fucking literally everybody else, apparently.

I agree with this post. A $200 million failure clearly refutes the first portion of the sentence: "Concord wasn't a bad game, but it just didn't generate enough interest with enough players". Heck, where I work, a $200 million failure would have someone sent to jail.

Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia

In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?

If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.

AI doesn't "siphon up and launder" code any more than your brain does. Both *can* memorize (which is why sometimes comedians can accidentally steal a joke), but both are also learning from patterns.

AI isn't going to make people stop contributing to open source.