I'm not from the future. It's just that time is cyclical.

There are various hypotheses to explain it, such that the universe is cyclical or that we're stuck in a time loop. But the most broadly accepted hypothesis is that a prior civilization collapsed at the end of year 32,767, and it has taken us almost 35,000 years to get back to where we are now.

Of course, our calendar doesn't allow for a year 0, so we may have an off-by-one error. But then again people celebrated the millennium at the end of 1999, so maybe there's a tacit assumption that there was in fact a year 0.
 

Fair enough. Then we're not really discussing creativity or artistic merit, are we? We're discussing labor economics. You can't have it both ways, friend.

History suggests they'll absolutely try. Capital has been replacing expensive labor with cheaper tools since the first accountant discovered the abacus. But that's a separate argument. You've constructed a false dichotomy where AI is either worthless "prompt-generated garbage" or a tool for eliminating artists. Those are not the only two possibilities. A24 exploring a third option: AI as a collaborator and creative amplifier.

Let go of your bias for a moment. A storyboard artist who can explore fifty concepts in a day instead of five is still creating. A screenwriter who can rapidly test dialogue variations is still writing. A director who can visualize scenes before committing a budget is still directing.

The tool changes. The creative process remains. You seem to be willfully ignoring this reality in your argument. There is way more to being creative than just coming up with an original thought or vision.

I think you are missing some history here. The modern storyboard was popularized at Disney in the early 1930s when Webb Smith started pinning sketches to a board so directors could experiment with sequences before spending time and money animating them. Drawing fifty sketches was cheaper than animating fifty scenes. It was literally a labor-saving innovation that allowed creative people to iterate faster. It was such a useful hack that it became the industry standard very, very quickly.

And other technologies followed the exact same trajectory -- non-linear digital editing systems, CGI, even Photoshop. Every generation of creative tooling is greeted by predictions that creativity itself is under attack. But being creative is more than just coming up with an entertaining idea. It also includes getting it out there so that an audience can appreciate it. That is what directors do. If you want to monetize it at the same time, fine -- that is what studios are for. You have a very narrow definition of creative, if it doesn't include all the scaffolding that creatives actually need to produce a work that can be shared, for profit or otherwise.

The real question is not whether AI can contribute to the creative process. It demonstrably can. The real question is: When an AI is inserted into the process, who captures the productivity gains? That's a debate worth having. You are welcome to join, if you can stop pretending the only possible outcomes are "AI garbage" or "artist unemployment". Until then, you are missing a much more interesting and relevant discussion.

Solar is, by far, leading the growth of renewables. Solar is not a good source of energy in Canada, due to their high latitude (the angle of the sun is much less thus passing through more atmosphere), the disparity in amount of daylight received from season to season, and then the amount of snowfall they get, which covers solar panels.

Nuclear is one of the better sources of clean energy for a country like Canada.

That implies that the software was actually good to begin with. Outlook never had that characteristic, unless your criteria for "good" includes good for passing viruses.

My work phone is an iPhone, and we're required to use Outlook for work email. On average outlook gets patched twice a week for iPhone. The biggest flaw in it though has been there for years and clearly won't get patched.

Namely, Outlook for iPhone always defaults to reply all for emails with multiple recipients. It doesn't matter how long the list is, it will reply all unless you go out of your way to reply only to the sender. This has catastrophic consequences at large companies.

It is not uncommon to have email threads at my employer with dozens, or even over 100, recipients. When one goes out with any ambiguity we quickly see who on the list is reading it on their iPhone (vs their laptop) as they inevitably will end up doing a reply all without meaning to.

Apparently Microsoft sees this as a feature, even though they don't force this feature upon us in Windows.

And the number of false convictions (roughly 25% of those convicted in the US) doesn't cause a problem for you?

Then you're part of the problem.

The way things are headed, the only way people are going to be able to obtain money to pay for those widgets is via social welfare programs.

Actually, I like watching the stunt men and special effects.

Nah, they're just jealous that other people's fuckups have been dominating the news, and they want some of that old-fashioned media love too.

I haven't been to the cinema since 2917, because everything was already too boring and predictable to watch. Let alone pay for.

Sounds interesting, but nothing concrete yet.

Wake me up when there's an actual interface that I can ask 3 questions of (like a genie with 3 wishes) and maybe a local instance I can run in virtualization.

Have you ever considered that pointing out that "x is bad" does not in any way imply "y is good".

US: 66% (Wall Street's numbers aren't those found in official statistics)
UK: 28.9%
Holland: 23%
Norway: 16%
China: 6%

US' conclusion: The rate is a complete mystery, we've no idea how to decrease it, let's do more of what we're currently doing differently to everyone else.

There is a slight possibility this may be flawed.

The interesting part here is not that there are suddenly "responsible AI" groups on both sides of the AI policy binary, but that that everyone with a stake in the debate around AI has discovered "guardrails" as the new magic word.

Look at ARIAM. It is not a grassroots creators' revolt. It is a coalition of incumbent content companies, publishers, and mission-aligned tech firms trying to shape the legal environment around AI. Copyright, attribution, liability, and provenance are real issues; I'm fairly certain Disney, Adobe, the New York Times, Conde Nast, Wiley, the BBC, et al. have not wandered into this debate as disinterested philosophers of human creativity. They have assets to defend, licensing markets to create, and future tollbooths to position. You can bet they are trying to figure out how to plant a cop and a tollbooth between creators who see AI as a collaborator and tool, and the vast catalogs of old media that Big Tech AI companies are already pillaging for training sets.

The Guardrails Alliance has the same problem from the political side. Calling this Super PAC "grassroots" is doing a lot of semantic cardio. A Super PAC aiming to convert the discontent of tech workers into cash donations, launched by political operatives (not tech workers!), with millions already in the barrel, is not exactly a grassroots movement. Again, that does not make its policy goals wrong. But it does mean the "ordinary workers vs Big Tech" framing deserves the same skepticism we would apply if the labels were reversed. Guardrails has not filed their first FEC report, so we don't know (yet) where that $5M in seed financing came from. I'm going to bet it wasn't from a collection of disgruntled coders and studio artists worried that they were being asked to train their LLM-based replacements. I wouldn't be surprised if this is just the AI version of every grievance PAC that apparatchiks on both sides of the political divide have been farming low-information voters with since Citizens United made that kind of grift legal. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

I think the pattern that is emerging is pretty straightforward. AI policy is not a binary anymore (if it ever was.) AI policy is a multi-sided auction. One side, Big Tech incumbents like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic, want broad freedom to scrape, train, deploy, and preempt regulation. Another side wants safety rules that may also conveniently raise barriers to entry and protect existing jobs. A third side wants copyright, licensing, and liability rules that let them safely monetize their media catalogs, old and new, and charge rent for anything they control the IP for. And in the back row of the auction house are the indie devs, open-weight model tinkerers, and local-inference gurus trying to run useful AI on hardware they actually own. At least they are not jumping on the guardrails bandwagon. Yet. :)

Everybody can say "we want guardrails around AI." Everybody can invoke democracy, safety, creators, workers, children, innovation, or national competitiveness. The question is not which faction has the prettiest noun pile. The question is who gets paid, who gets regulated out of the market, and who gets to write the definitions of what LLMs are allowed and not allowed to do.

Let's put the guardrails where they really need to be. Before buying any of the rhetoric, I want to see the donor lists, the advisers, the vendors, the affiliated nonprofits, and the model legislation. "Guardrails" can mean public safety. It can also mean a velvet rope around somebody else’s cash register, or a visit from the copyright police because your ChatGPT prompt created a token string that Disney or the BBC or NYT says belongs to them.