AI has done nothing of the sort, and in fact, has done the opposite. Individuals in creative industries have lost their jobs and income because consumers have chosen to either generate their own slop or purchase slop because it's cheaper than real, human-made work. And there is no reason to believe nor any evidence to support the notion that AI will lead to this post-scarcity paradise you claim will come into being. Simply legislating it will not make it happen. As much as I respect Sanders for the attempt, it fundamentally fails to address the core, underlying problem with generative AI, which is that it can only thrive by stealing the collective output of actual humans, and in doing so, suppresses the desire to be creative.

Nobody will WANT to be free to do what they want if everything they do is watched, tracked, datamined, analyzed, and repackaged for consumption. The problem is not even about the economics of labor. It's about what the quality of life means for a society in which every thought and action is being analyzed. I don't want to live like that. I don't know anyone who does, and if you do, then YOU go and do it. I don't want any part of your dystopian panoptic bullshit.

I don't think that's a meaningful question to ask, since it seems to be based on the flawed premise that there should only be a limited market for creative work, and that the forces of supply and demand ought to dictate how we as a society should value such work.

And what the developments in generative AI have shown us is that those same market forces have no problem trying to replace the underappreciated, underpaid work of countless artists and creative industry employees with a neverending firehose of AI slop.

The human desire to create and the desire for imaginative self-expression is extremely deep seated. To be told that this is economically worthless, easily replaceable, and undeserving of recognition, while at the same time the very means for automated generation of AI slop are stolen from and built upon centuries of handcrafted, human-imagined labor, is the height of hypocrisy.

So, to answer your useless question, no. The world does NOT need more starving artists. What the world needs is to properly recognize the value of human art and creative expression. And to the extent that technology is being used to suppress the worth of others, I say artists have every right to reject it. I hate the panoptic, uneducated society we have become. I detest how creative people are being forced to choose between bringing something new into this world, versus preventing some tech oligarch from training a LLM model on it. I despise the fact that mega-corporations routinely wield their vast financial and legal resources to protect the enormously profitable intellectual property that they pay slave wages to artists to create.

I don't know this Eggers guy. I haven't read his books. Whatever he wants to do with his time and money is up to him. But wanting to give more people a pathway to create, and to do it without having it stolen by the Zuckerbergs and Musks and Altmans and Bezoses of this world so that they can turn around and claim that the same things they've stolen are not really worth anything after all, is, in my opinion, better than sitting behind a computer asking whether the market for art is saturated.

The teachers--at least, the competent ones--are often the only ones who care. But they're the least empowered of the parties involved.

They are paid a pittance by the district and treated like glorified babysitters by the parents. They have had their ability to enact discipline taken away; parents are unwilling to hear that their little angel could do anything wrong or that they themselves are responsible for a home environment that doesn't foster learning.

The administrators only want to line their own pockets. They keep increasing class sizes and cutting programs and services, while repeatedly falling for band-aid, quick fix "solutions" pushed by corporate educational snake oil salesmen.

Parents are overworked, underpaid, and can barely enforce discipline on their kids. They've abdicated their role as parents to social media algorithhms. In this regard, social media is a symptom of the problem, not the root cause. In other parts of the world where social media is as pervasive, why have we not seen a similar magnitude of decline in learning outcomes?

Meanwhile, corporations and politicians are behind much of these problems. It's a societal and cultural issue, in which those in power correctly believe that they don't need to cultivate future generations of intelligent citizens. They only need some of them--their own children and friends--to be well educated, while the rest of the working class only needs to be smart enough to do whatever menial tasks their corporate overlords enslave them to do.

Democracy is for retards.

Government did this. All of this. Government regulated so much that only a rare few can afford to compete.

This is late stage statism. Retard voters are to blame.

Like you.

It makes more sense as a dialogue if we think of it not so much as a one-to-one conversation, but more like an ongoing, global discourse. After all, movies are not made in a vacuum, and they are--generally speaking--not made for a single specific individual to watch. The artist is informed and shaped by their experiences.

I frame it this way because I want to move away from the "maker"/"viewer" framework--this dichotomy of the creator of an experience versus those who experience the creation. There is a kind of feedback at play that is intrinsic to the ability to create art and to enjoy it. We even see this in cinema--the works of actors (which roles they choose, how they play those roles) are invariably influenced by the culture and sentiments that surround them.

In a strict sense, you are right--it's not as if the artist is directly engaging in a back-and-forth literal conversation. But I think that a more encompassing point of view is useful for contextualizing why generative AI being propped up as "art" is so offensive to some. It doesn't feel "real" to us, and it isn't because the tool is "artificial"--we have computer animated films, for instance. It's because it feels disengaged from that feeling of human connection.

is not, as many would have you believe, to be found solely in its consumption or appreciation.

Art is a dialogue. It is a conversation between humans--those who feel joy and pain, sorrow and hope; and it is the embodiment of creative expression in which the artist, for all their imperfections and struggle, brings into being something that marks existence--as if to say, "I was once here, in this space that you now observe."

And that is not necessarily pretentiousness or egocentrism. Art is born from a desire to connect with others, across space and time.

The intrinsic problem of "generative AI" as it is presently utilized as a vehicle of artistic expression is that, overwhelmingly, it fails to create a true dialogue, in much the same way that using a chatbot amounts to speaking with nobody but yourself. There may be a director and other humans who are prompting the AI and exerting control over the output, but the lack of human actors and cinematographers means that the result can only ever be a simulation of art, not art itself. It is not until we can create artificial consciousness--machines that experience human emotions and concept of self--that we can ever say that their status can transcend that of mere tools and their product might become art. To be clear, I am not suggesting we should attempt to do so. But what we have today is very, very far away from this.

Maybe a simulation is enough for most people, who think of popular media as nothing more than transitory stories to consume, discard, and forget. That the audience may not have the capacity to respect art as a process, by failing to distinguish what it is and is not, does not invalidate the artist, no more than someone who doesn't understand mathematics or computer programming can decide that it is not worth learning or doing.

The reason why there is a lot of pushback against AI has to do with the preposterous notion that it can (and therefore, should) serve as a substitute for human creativity. Of all of the things that such sophisticated computational models could be used for, the last thing that I would want it to do for me is my thinking and feeling. We should be using technology to make our lives easier and give us more freedom to express ourselves creatively, not less. People who are using it to simulate art have entirely missed the point of why we make art in the first place. Creative expression is not a chore like washing my dishes and scrubbing my toilet bowl. Yes, making art is sometimes painful and difficult and challenging. But that struggle is not something to be eliminated. It is meant to be overcome.

AI apologists--at least, nearly all of those I have met--are, in my view, nearly entirely lacking in understanding of what makes living worthwhile; and those who do understand are intentionally and cynically promoting AI because they stand to gain financially from this position.

Grok was constantly say it was doing something that it had ZERO ability to, and I kept calling it out and it kept apologizing and then immediately doing it again.

As a guy who spend 5 figures a year on Ai, the last thing I want is that. I know Claude and ChatGPT also do it, but Grok was doing it CONSTANTLY.

This will not end well.

Why is this a problem?

I do not want my software censoring anything I make.

Neoliberalism and liberalism are two totally different things.

Ai will just shine the light on the class of workers who have make-work just that exist solely to push them to vote harder.

When we can let markets replace them, itâ(TM)ll be a tragedy for a few generations and then it will be forgotten.

I am anti copyright and have been all my life. I have created things of value and always dump them into the public domain.

Copyright infringes our rights to use our brain and voice and hands and body.

Fuck IP.

Federal regulations are stupid level: they are owned by lobbyists and megacorps.

Send this to the states.

Regulators should be afraid of weaponized Ai. So should censors. So should monopolists.

All of the things the State has done in the past 500 years has been corrupt and bureaucratic and caused harm. All. Not most, but all.

All of the people who supported it, from monopolists to lobbyists to activists caused harm.

Ai is undoing it all. Not piece by piece but all at once.

I, for one, can't wait to see folks zapped for restraining voluntary behavior.

This is why it's time to end social security.

I look at how much I've paid in over my life, and what it would be worth to me today EVEN IF you took out a lot to take care of the infirm and disabled.

There is no way that 65% of the population needs a full handout, but that's about what I'm paying.