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.

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

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.

a.) There's little interest in interrogating the downsides of generative AI, such as the environmental impact, the data theft impact, the treatment and exploitation of data workers.

That's all the press ever fucking talks about, to the point where you've got people who use the cloud for everything bitching about AI like the rest of their cloud use isn't impacting the environment. Also, analyzing data isn't theft.

b.) There's little interest in considering the extent to which, by incorporating generative AI into our teaching, we end up supporting a handful of companies that are burning billions in a vain attempt to each achieve performance that is a scintilla better than everyone else's.

People need to learn about and use open source AI. There are plenty of very good options.

c.) There's little interest in thinking about what's going to happen when the LLM companies decide that they have plateaued, that there's no more money to burn/spend, and a bunch of them fold—but we've perturbed education to such an extent that our students can no longer function without their AI helpers. ...so AI is going to magically disappear if/when it plateaus and there are still gazillions of customers who want to use it? Some companies will probably go under when the investment cash dries up, but not all of them. AI isn't going to vanish.

Oh, and if all those companies crap out, open source AI is still going to exist. Those models won't magically vanish either.

Did you just pick a random person to say that to?

...probably aren't going to do their research, and will be willing to buy a shittier version for a higher price.

This camera is a fashion accessory for shallow people.

It's a good way of laying off the people who are good enough at what they do that they can find other jobs.

Found the office building real estate investor. Or the sociopath from upper management.