analogpixel
9 hours ago
I feel like AI has gotten to the point where the message is: If you want to make something (art/code/music/writing) you can do it for your own enjoyment, but you aren't allowed to make money from it anymore; only the large corporations can make money from content. If you do release something creative, it'll just be fed back into the machine to be copied over and over.
Eyeland0
3 hours ago
"And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity." -William S. Burroughs
pembrook
2 hours ago
Yes, the craft to mass production pipeline (democratization) is frustrating for the individual craftsman, as has been true for hundreds of years.
AI is simply the assembly line for the digital realm. It takes the trendy products of the rich (custom software, McKinsey PowerPoint decks, etc) and mass produces them in the same style so everyone can afford to buy them at Walmart.
For things where the exclusivity WAS the value (like McKinsey consulting PowerPoints), they may fall out of fashion altogether when everyone can have them. Like performative 17th century aristocrat clothing styles.
I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing hand-loomed fabrics and bespoke clothing and $5,000 cobbler-pounded leather boots while typing angrily on their keyboards.
I also don’t see anyone commissioning artisan chair makers and blacksmiths to create $10,000+ custom furniture to sit on while posting pessimistic comments to HN.
Nobody here seems to want to hire a carriage maker to build a custom $400,000 automobile, they seem to all go for mass produced models, betraying the local artisans.
The hypocrisy is downright silly.
The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans (and ultimately the artisans benefit too given nobody is a true artisan in more than a few things). This ultimately raises living standards for everyone.
nstart
an hour ago
That is a very poor comparison. Firstly, you're ignoring that behind the mass manufactured stuff, there's a lot of abused labour. People do protest that. Because of how money works, it's also impossible to avoid it.
Second, machinery that automated work isn't remotely the same. Engineers have built and refined the machines without having to go and inspect every new work that has been created by artisans each time. Creative people who have practiced the art of designing clothes and shoes stitch together and build prototypes. Entire machinery is built as an independent path away from how artisans build furniture.
There is a parallel though for how LLMs, in order to improve, gobble up all new work produced by people and never give attribution back. We see it when someone does a unique physical product design and starts selling it only for some 2 bit shop elsewhere to try and copy and sell a cheap knockoff version. The original person does all the hard work of prototyping and testing and the 2 bit shop which has access to more machinery resources buys a couple, copies it with less quality, makes a few changes, sells it, and probably outspends the original person on ad revenue too.
No, GenAI doesn't produce the exact same work as what they ingest. But style does get reproduced. And style is such a difficult problem to solve. Studio Ghibli didn't craft its signature style by accident. People prototyped and worked hard on how to design it, how to solve the problems unique to the design, created rules for it, and then painstakingly made the stories that were best told through that style. Only for the AI companies to pop out some bastardized version of it every time someone says "make my picture anime". No attribution given. No love. No homage. Just an encouragement for hordes of people to claim how easy it is without ever understanding the thought that actually went into it.
So no. It's not hypocrisy. It's recognition of these machines being information and creative laundering factories. They take and take and never give back any value that they could never create or improve on on their own. Those last words being key
lelanthran
29 minutes ago
Your analogy, I feel, is inaccurate.
This isn't only mass-produced products replacing bespoke products, it's also the strip-mining of attribution.
A better analogy is if we were to abolish trademark protection completely; anyone can go create a Nike knockoff, complete with the branding, and sell them legally.
This is what the blog post under discussion is complaining about - your labour will be laundered through the machine, and presented to an end-user with the end-user having never heard of you.
AlecSchueler
an hour ago
> The hypocrisy is downright silly.
> The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans
And in this case it's looking more like less than 1% benefiting at the expense of 85%?
> I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing ... commissioning ...
I would love to order more bespoke goods but mass production has driven most of the makers out of business and that ones that remain I can't afford. You're saying this as though I actually wanted this ugly IKEA closet.
pembrook
an hour ago
> it's looking more like less than 1% benefiting at the expense of 85%?
Your model of the world is wrong. 85% (even 99%) of people do not create any art, software, music, etc.
The vast majority of people are consumers of any given craft, and the 1% of the most passionate in a given field are creators, as has always been the case. It’s the same with people who create websites vs consume them.
> mass production has driven most of the makers out of business and ones that remain I can't afford
Again, your model of the world is wrong.
There was never a time when getting everything made bespoke was cheap. You’re pretending everyone was a rich aristocrat nobleman in the past if you think this is the case.
Historically you just wouldn't have a closet or enough clothing to fill it at all.
AlecSchueler
28 minutes ago
> 85% of people do not create any art, software, music, etc.
Etc.? I think you're overlooking a very broad range of occupations. From people getting into politics by doing newspaper summaries for party offices to people editing newspapers.
And if you're really pushing that it's 99% benefiting while 1% lose out then where do the kids whose schools get bombed or the women harassed with deepfakes fit in? Do they still benefit because they don't have to go to the trouble of writing a song about their pain?
It's the same companies and the same technologies doing all these things.
Let's not even get into the inauguration gifts in the US etc...
> You’re pretending everyone was a rich aristocrat nobleman in the past
I'm not pretending anything and my world model isn't "wrong." I don't mind having this discussion but I would ask you to mind your manners.
> There was never a time when getting everything made bespoke was cheap.
In my lifetime my family had many things made to order; from clothes to furniture. And I grew up in one of the poorest parts of the country, a working class area. But that meant that everyone worked and everyone had trades. My grandfather made me toys from scrap wood at the shipyard, my uncle was a joiner who made us better quality tables than I can get now, another was a plumber who ensured everything ran smoothly in our pipes. My aunts knitted and sewed everything we wanted. When a new fashion came out like skinny jeans they would tighten the ones we had; at Halloween I only had to say what I wanted to dress up as and the costume would appear.
Now if I go to the same area everyone is surviving on state benefits, the skills are all automated away and everyone is sitting in the same gray houses with the same gray furniture. And everyone looks miserable.
But at least no one has to do any expressionist painting to let their emotions out, they can just prompt it now and enjoy more and more consumption.
wolvesechoes
an hour ago
Comparing GenAI to any previous "disruptions" (and these also had very negative consequences for large swaths of people, even if you consider them net positive) only shows ignorance of the person making a comparison.
Valakas_
2 hours ago
Just another quote to balance that one, since we can make quotes for anything and use them whenever it fits our narrative:
"Garbage in, garbage out."
soundworlds
8 hours ago
As someone who simultaneously makes music professionally, and works in IT professionally, it has been really interesting watching GenAI unfold, and the diverging cultures around it. It is almost like the world is splitting into two "societies":
1. One that loves AI + Big Business + very fast Innovation and disruption
2. One that loves Artisanal work + Small Business + slower but more sustainable innovation
I personally prefer living in #2, but I can totally see both "societies" continuing to exist and develop in their own ways.
Of course there is always the reality that different societies always end up interacting and affecting eachother.
nunez
7 hours ago
I'm almost certain there is biblical-level astroturfing happening to make camp (1) much bigger than it really is.
Otherwise, Schmidt wouldn't have drowned in a sea of boos at his commencement speech at UA.
acdha
5 hours ago
I think there’s also a lot of people who haven’t quite realized what side they’re on. A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class and didn’t realize that the average CEO/VC views us roughly the same as the janitors except more expensive and less reliable. If you’re currently working at a stable tech job, it’s easy to focus on the cool things you can do and ignore how hungry those guys are for a massive cut in salaries, how much harder it will be to get an new job, and that trying to start your own company is harder than in recent decades with more established gatekeepers and LLMs being very good at copying a successful product.
New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.
nunez
4 hours ago
> New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.
Respectfully disagree. New grads entering the workforce now started college in 2022. This was during the post-COVID "Great Resignation" when offers and employee leverage were at their peak and AI wasn't that useful.
Very different from the "use AI or your fired/blackballed" age we live in now.
pjmlp
2 hours ago
Even that is very regional.
While tech pays well, in many countries it is seen as a regular office worker, with a similar salary level.
And if you are doing consulting is very much a gig economy job, if you're going on your own.
somenameforme
4 hours ago
Exactly what I was thinking when a recent big bank CEO accidentally let his contempt slip out. He referred to mass layoffs as "It's not cost-cutting. It's replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we're putting in." [1]
That "lower-value human capital" isn't janitors - it's a wide array of highly skilled professions including software engineers and many others. Of course the guy who's at the top engaging in nothing but 'unfalsifiable' fuzzy actions, and could be replaced (sans his connections/corruptions) most easily of all, is ultra-high-mega-untouchable infinity value humanity embodied.
I really don't like what big business does to people, on the bottom and the top. The fact somebody could even use the term lower-value human capital without cringing at themselves, let alone to a reporter in public - that's one hell of a bubble this guy lives in. And now we're dumping "AI" into this bubble. WCGW?
[1] - https://news.sky.com/story/standard-chartered-to-replace-low...
wolvesechoes
an hour ago
> A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class
False consciousness always strikes back.
soundworlds
3 hours ago
One of the funny parts about all of this, is that janitors are likely less threatened by GenAI than information workers are.
Hell, janitors' work is less threatened by GenAI than most of the CEOs who are super-hyped about that very same GenAI.
David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs might actually work as a roadmap of sorts..
palmotea
2 hours ago
> One of the funny parts about all of this, is that janitors are likely less threatened by GenAI than information workers are.
But that's cold comfort, because janitors are already paid shit wages.
The insecurity about AI isn't exactly "will I keep my job?" It's "will I be thrown into a life of precarity as my skills are devalued?"
Janitors aren't threatened by GenAI, because they're already where the threats take you.
snapplebobapple
6 hours ago
Its probably a situation where you cant choose what you actually want so you choose closest. For me that would be camp 1 but i hate big business because of all the obvious oligopoly market power abuse. Id go back to the 60s antitrust where they were breaking up regional gas station chains if i could because it was more correct than what we are doing. Most of the big guys on nasdaq and s&p need to be broken up imo
snapplebobapple
3 hours ago
man... hacker news is making me sad here. The blatantly obvious stuff that leans left gets upvoted +5 and the blatantly obvious comment made by me directly before this one that leans right is -1. This place used to care more about the correct answer.
verisimi
20 minutes ago
I think it was always about the left-leaning answers - while sharing right-leaning concerns, the consensus answer is always more legislation, closer administrative control.
danaris
an hour ago
> upvoted +5
Spot the (other) Slashdot refugee! (And why were you at the Devil's Sacrament, Mr. Danaris?)
eszed
an hour ago
Complaining about downvotes used to be uncouth, but whatever. :-)
For what it's worth, I'm pretty "left" - at least within the HN bubble - and I like the cut of your jib. I devoutly wish that the broader "right" cared even one iota about anti-trust / anti-monopoly enforcement.
bluegatty
2 hours ago
No, the narratives are flooding in all directions.
A group of 22 year olds are 'hissing' because they're upset, not because they have some magic insight.
AI is real, it is overstated, the value is not comping to Main Street.
wwweston
4 hours ago
And it just so happens that one of the things the new tech is good for is astroturfing.
xantronix
5 hours ago
Who would be payrolling this astroturfing in group #1?
reactordev
3 hours ago
I too am a musician and a, well, was a, tech person. I’m completely in the #2 camp. I enjoy AI music, AI art, but I enjoy originality more.
That said, I also think there’s an element of bullshit in the room where an LLM will look like it’s doing something profound but ultimately isn’t, or doesn’t work, or has no actual proof. This “hallucination zone”. They can still do great things but they need a solid hand holding to not get it wrong 20% of the time.
TightFibre
20 minutes ago
As an early web guy who gets off on tech and problem solving I have long hated the industry with a passion as I see it as a fundamental brain drain for society full of bullshit jobs and bullshit people. Including of course myself. I should welcome the automation and yet my heart feels ripped out as the emperor has been laid bare with 20 odd years going up in smoke as vultures pick at the corpses of the old guard.
marcus_holmes
7 hours ago
I make my own furniture. I am absolutely not a carpenter. But I hate Ikea furniture - it's made of shitty, flimsy, materials, and its design priorities are all based on cost and ease of transport, not on being great furniture that will last years and be an actual asset to the home.
This is an analogy, obviously. Ikea has been innovative, and it does provide a useful service for people; if you just moved into a new place and need to furnish it as quickly and cheaply as possible, then off to Ikea you go. But it's still shitty furniture.
My furniture doesn't look great, sometimes. My joinery is not perfect. I don't have all the tools I need to do this properly. But the design goals for each are what we need to live our lives. My wife has a stupidly high bed in her office, piled mattresses so she can spread them out if we have many visitors. I made her a bedside table that matches that height. It's a complete one-off; I won't make another that size, and we probably won't need it if we move house.
My point is that we already have this split in other areas of our lives; the Vimes Theory of boots (rich people buy boots that last generations, poor people buy boots every year). Ikea furniture. Buying a mass-produced crockery from a big store, or buying hand-made crockery from a local potter. We're just adding information and code to this split.
technotarek
7 hours ago
I’m not a furniture maker, but I have a rather close connection to the industry. I used to hate ikea furniture. In fact I hated almost all modern furniture that mass market, that wasn’t high end. I was a huge proponent of vintage furniture ( and still am), but I have really come around on ikea. They sure still make some crap, but they also make some genuinely innovative pieces that can last if you treat them with a basic level of care. I’d specifically call out / praise a few of their beds with built in drawer solutions. A few good desks too. They also have other mostly solid wood products too. It really depends. Just my $0.02.
rainbowDolphin
6 hours ago
Agreed. I was a carpenter for a long time and have built everything from completely disposable structures to things that ended up in Design Within Reach.
I think Ikea is great. Sure, the cheaper stuff consists of veneered particle board at best. But they (at least used to) use thicker veneers, often include relatively high quality hardware, and make some products that are just completely solid (stainless kitchen gear, simple but serviceable pine furniture, standing desks, some bedding).
What gets to me are places like West Elm and similar companies. Mid-Century design, but it's the same veneered particle board as the much cheaper Ikea stuff, and costs far more.
bostik
2 hours ago
Many of Ikea's wood (wood-like?) products are pretty flimsy, designed to be built once and never moved or taken apart. (cough - all cupboards, most cabinets - cough)
But somewhat ironically their steel kitchenware is competitive with catering equipment. It may not be as well designed for maximum functionality and storage packing efficiency, but costs about the same or even less than comparable Vogue gear. Over the years I've spotted an increasing number of street food vendors using Ikea bowls and trays, so the price and availability advantage appears to be real.
fragmede
6 hours ago
That's the thing. Ikea's alternatives are all worse in some dimension. The Amish do make good furniture though.
bigfatkitten
2 hours ago
Ikea is an interesting place in that you can get something that will either last either 15 minutes or 75 years. There really isn’t much in between.
marcus_holmes
6 hours ago
Agree completely. As I said, Ikea provide a valuable service. And I'm sure that for some pieces, quality is compatible with the core design values of cost and transportability.
And, to extend the analogy, I'm sure Google's AI results will be perfectly serviceable for some people in some situations.
But for my wife's odd, non-standard, situation I had to build it myself. And for some people's odd, non-standard, situation they'll need to construct (or find) a bespoke information service that matches their needs. That will probably cost them more and the joinery won't be as neat.
saalweachter
6 hours ago
There's a tier of quality that's just fine... as long as you don't move it much, either from home to home or just rearranging too much.
If you do, then the unglued joints decay and it becomes wobblier and wobblier.
valicord
6 hours ago
My IKEA furniture has lasted 12 years so far, including 3 moves, with only minor cosmetic damage.
gammarator
5 hours ago
I have a 20 year old Malm dresser that made four moves and is doing just fine.
(I do have it screwed into the wall as it’s been recalled for tipovers.)
jonfromsf
4 hours ago
I think the Malm has the highest body count of any individual piece of furniture on the planet.
Broken_Hippo
3 hours ago
A lot of their furniture now has warnings that it must be secured to the wall - for that very reason. On their (Norwegian) website, this starts with furniture around 100cm tall, especially if it is talland thin or sits on legs.
I guess the change (and recalls) are a result of lawsuits from that same dresser.
Procrastes
7 hours ago
I want to buy you a CMOT Dibbler Sausage for the Vimes reference. Perfect metaphor for this situation. His point was that it was the cheap boots that keep people poor, so that makes me think artist and artisan patronage will be an even bigger thing in years to come.
JohnBooty
7 hours ago
Do you think that AI could actually free up time in your life in other areas, so that you could spend more time doing the things you love like making furniture? Or maybe help you directly in your furniture-making, by perhaps helping you to research things?
Please don't misunderstand: my point is not "AI is good."
It is problematic in many ways. My point is that I think the "AI versus actually doing cool human-crafted stuff" split is... a misguided, maybe even harmful, mental model of a more complicated reality.
luk212
2 hours ago
That's the promise of every new technology. Although there's been massive progress over the past 50+ years, the amount of free time that people have has actually gone DOWN (https://clockify.me/working-hours)..."I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes"...we'll see
eproxus
2 hours ago
I think in a different society this could have been the case (possibly, assuming the hype is somewhat true).
But the way society is structured now? We still live in feudalism, just uplifted to modern levels of ”comfort” (if you take of your western glasses and look at the whole world. There are still people living in medieval conditions today in some places in the world).
The way it’s going it’s only going to make rich people richer, and give them more power to control this system and perpetuate it. I don’t see that drastically changing anytime soon, unless we do something about it on a societal level.
xgulfie
6 hours ago
What time is AI going to free up for me? Can AI go to the grocery store for me, do my laundry, do my dishes? Can it let me clock out early? The spoils of AI do not go to individuals
DauntingPear7
6 hours ago
AI, as it stands, only can save you time with non-human interaction “intellectual” tasks on a computer. So really not much
AlexCoventry
6 hours ago
It's excellent for R&D.
fragmede
6 hours ago
It's not AI, but there's Doordash and Rinse if that's what you're trying to optimize for. The robots will be coming out, soon enough, and then we're all in trouble though.
wolvesechoes
44 minutes ago
Direct consequence of industrial revolution was an INCREASE in workload. People worked MORE, not less. It required organization, protests, political pressure and even some bloodshed to get 8 hrs workday.
People that push for AI are not interested in making your life better.
notabotiswear
4 hours ago
> Do you think that AI could actually free up time in your life in other areas, so that you could spend more time doing the things you love.
Personally, I don’t believe that would be the case. Jevon’s paradox mixed with the natural tendency to exploit others. One could argue that technology -in general- didn’t really save people time by itself, it’s regulation - a social construct, and I am counting both cultural and legal enforcement of them as well- that did. Just look at how workers in countries without your European-style protections fare. Wikipedia’s article on the Chinese 996 [1] has a nice map for deaths due to long working hours by country, notice the dominant colours for each quadrant of this (projected) globe.
Pre industrialised societies’ labourers were limited by daylight and travel distance. The modern availability and abundance of artificial lighting, mechanised transportation, and telecommunication means their grand kids are expected to -and often do- toil every waking moment.
wanoir
6 hours ago
> the Vimes Theory of boots (rich people buy boots that last generations, poor people buy boots every year)
This made me think of a fascinating exception to this
Luxury-brand cars usually get turned over every couple years so as to avoid their inevitable maintenance cliff
marcus_holmes
6 hours ago
It is an interesting exception.
The really rich people that I know of drive 10-year-old beaten-up Land Rovers, though.
I think there's a nouveau-riche slice of folks who buy "luxury" cars thinking that they confer status. There are brands like this in every industry, that adopt all the pointers of "luxury" except actual quality.
bitwize
3 hours ago
There was a study sometime back that suggested most American millionaires live in homes of modest or at least unostentatious size and drive used cars of American make. These days it'd probably be of Japanese make, as Toyotas and Nissans are relatively cheap and last forever. Having a lot of money and showing the world that you have a lot of money are completely different goals. You'll be flat broke if you join an MLM with 99.5% certainty, but if you're a good enough salesperson they'll loan out a Mercedes or something to drive around so you can show off how rich the plan made you and "edify your upline". You're on the hook for fuel and maintenance, though.
Maybe it's the Scots-Irish in him, but my father was always one to go for the luxury stuff, but still seek out the good quality stuff at as good a price as he can manage and fix it up if it were broken. He knows how to keep a Cadillac Eldorado on the road for 20 years or more, so of course he's going to spring for the fancy if a used one turns up at a good price. In the 80s he bought a small mansion that was in a quasi-dilapidated state but had been standing since the opening years of the 20th century. We renovated it inside and out, and today it's on the National Register of Historic Places (though my parents no longer live there).
wanoir
2 hours ago
> still seek out the good quality stuff at as good a price as he can manage and fix it up if it were broken.
I think that's a nice story to highlight, being able to do things well and preserving that knowledge
While there can be benefits for mass producing things, what actually is produced is going to be limited by what techniques are conducive to automation. So the techniques that are hard to automate are lost from the market of provided goods and then human capital for it also gets lost (can't think of any concrete examples off the top of my head, but maybe the techniques for some elements of clothing that are now only found in couture/custom pieces). Another related idea is how there are much fewer color variations in manufactured goods now, simply because it simplifies the mass manufacturing process.
marcus_holmes
an hour ago
> can't think of any concrete examples off the top of my head, but maybe the techniques for some elements of clothing that are now only found in couture/custom pieces
Maybe how clothes used to come with a decent margin on the hems so you could alter them, but now they don't?
bmitc
6 hours ago
Ikea has long existed before the Internet and over capitalization.
I have several Ikea pieces in my home, and I've had some for over a decade. If you build Ikea stuff properly, are selective in what you purchase, and use wood glue when constructing, then it lasts as long as anything else really.
Their flat packed designs are actually innovative. People can outfit an entire room by using a Honda Fit to transport.
marcus_holmes
3 hours ago
Agree completely, as I said their design priorities are cost and transportability, and they provide a valuable service. Mostly I hate the shitty laminated chipboard half their stuff is made from. If you replaced that with actual wood, and some of the weird aluminium pegs with actual dowels or joinery, it'd be fine. But that's kinda beside the point; if you did that it would be more expensive and less easily transported, and therefore wouldn't fit their priorities.
And, of course, their bedside cabinets are the wrong size for my wife's bed, so I'd have to make one anyway.
And this is just an analogy; if you like Ikea-style Google Search, then great for you. I pay for Kagi because that Ikea-style Google Search doesn't work for me.
newaccountman2
5 hours ago
> But I hate Ikea furniture - it's made of shitty, flimsy, materials, and its design priorities are all based on cost and ease of transport, not on being great furniture that will last years and be an actual asset to the home.
I have seen/heard this a lot lately, but all the Ikea furniture I have ever had has been great. Among others, had a chair that was good for like 11 years lol
marcus_holmes
44 minutes ago
I think this is actually a counter-example of what you think it is.
Chairs should last generations. A chair lasting 11 years is not exemplary. A chair falling apart after a few years should be the exception, and a bad thing at that.
Again, Vimes Theory: rich folks inherit furniture that their grandparents bought, and maybe need to get it re-upholstered once in their lifetime. Poor folks have to pay for new furniture every few years because it falls apart.
perilunar
a minute ago
My parents bought some really nice modern furniture when they married in the early 1960s. 5 houses and 60 years later (and a few re-upholsterings), it still looks and works as beautifully as ever. My brother will probably inherit it in a few years, then his kids; it will likely get another 60 years at least.
One of my friends has a kitchen table her great grandmother owned.
Neither of us (or our parents) are rich, but good, well made furniture used to be an investment. Now most furniture is disposable.
jasondigitized
8 hours ago
I predict mixtapes, with the operative word being tapes, make a big comeback.
eikenberry
8 hours ago
But big businesses suck at innovation so much that their primary form of innovation is through acquiring small businesses. But that is a big benefit for #2 as we need innovations to get to a sustainable system.
nickff
8 hours ago
The problem is that it is increasingly difficult to survive as a small business (due to constantly increasing compliance/regulatory/legal burdens), so it makes sense to ‘sell out’ as soon as possible (or just give up early). The rate of small businesses growing into large ones has been decreasing for at least 20 years.
shimman
7 hours ago
This is tech we are talking about. There are very little, if any, regulatory burdens in place here.
The only things that DO hurt SMBs across the board are things like paying for private health insurance and retirement plans. Two core things every worker needs but only massive corporations can truly provide.
It's why things like medicare for all and universal childcare are so popular among workers, also why things like corporate welfare are so disgusting.
nickff
7 hours ago
>"There are very little, if any, regulatory burdens in place here."
Speaking as someone who works in a small company that designs and manufactures embedded devices, I can tell you that many of the 'minor' regulations which are not supposed to burden small businesses actually do. My (single) biggest annoyance is the conflict minerals reporting requirements which were supposed to apply to very large companies, but have been 'passed down' to smaller suppliers (as anyone with half a brain would have expected). There are many other KYC, CBP, and other regulations which have substantial impacts as well.
Refreeze5224
4 hours ago
The only innovation needed to be sustainable is to recognize that capitalism is not sustainable, and never can be. But that's not a profitable innovation, so it never gets pursued.
danaris
41 minutes ago
That's not at all a benefit for #2—when small businesses that are thriving and making Society #2 better get bought up by big businesses, they cease to be part of Society #2. In many cases, the innovative things they were doing simply disappear, as the big business that bought them didn't want to use it, they just wanted to kill it.
"Big business," in the sense it exists today, is itself a detriment to our society as a whole, and can only exist because of the utter destruction of antitrust that happened under Reagan. Without that, much more of our current society would look like #2, with or without LLMs.
hunterpayne
8 hours ago
I don't see that at all. I see spammers and propagandists love LLMs because they can use it to accomplish their goals at the expense of the rest of us. I see AI companies marketing their products hard but in ways that seem self-defeating. Seems obvious but ads shouldn't make people hate the product and the AI folks don't seem to understand this. I see lots more effort to find artisanal things because people understand how much spammy stuff is being made. So I see basically an attack on the media ecosystem and people adapting with various levels of success to those attacks. I also see it costing the platforms as now they have extra effort and expense to keep their value for their users. Nobody wants to read a bunch of LLM generated slop on the social feed.
chronogamous
5 hours ago
Category 1 will ensure that, if either category prefers to continue to exist, we may very likely need to find another planet to keep doing what we're doing. Category 2 on it's own seems much less likely to wreck life-support on our current planet.
I can see the initial appeal, but right now it would seem that those people that dig the fast innovation and disruption the most are clueless on how easy it is to wreck this system by accident. Remember how CFK's were once considered a wonderful invention, as refrigerators no longer needed to be the size of a building filled with highly volatile gas. A rather unfortunate side-effect turned out to be the difficulty of getting the particles out of the atmosphere again. By the time it became apparent that this buildup up there would have rather drastic consequences for life down here, products containing CFK's were already massproduced and life without these products was unimaginable.
Apart from all the obvious, and all the known ways in which Big Tech keeps pushing towards climate conditions excluding organic, mammalian lifeforms, it no longer seems very far fetched that somebody will accidentally accellerate us to that point. As the moving fast part is largely a tactic to avoid accountability for the breaking things part, the person doing the breaking may be just as unaware of the danger that has been created, as the people they've razzle-dazzled, that will eventually realize something has been broken somewhere along the way... and a quick look at advertisements, American style, teaches us how even unnecessarily dangerous practices (like adding lead to just about everything, instead of figuring out how to do the same stuff without it) can be sold for ages and ages, long after people have started to realise the danger that has been introduced.
No matter how fast you move and how much you break, turning another planet into a place where people could live (not even talking about the ability to indulge in cultivating societies) is something Big Tech is unable to achieve over the next couple of years, and it remains to be seen if it will be able to reach a stage where they could make that happen with some certainty. Meanwhile, only a decade or two ago, Big Tech did actually have enough proven technology, insight and expertise that would have sufficed to nudge living conditions on Earth back within desireable margins. A lot of the data may have been poisoned, knowledge and tech has been lost, but the chances of achieving that seem well within Big Tech's grasp - were it not for the apparent inability of certain parties to refrain from moving fast as they're breaking stuff.
Long before anyone is actually in any position to start terraforming on Mars, much of what Big Tech is actually capable of doing reliably now, will no longer be feasible nor within their grasp.
Apologies if I'm ranting, but no, I can't see both 'societies' continuing to exist and develop in their own ways. If group 1 could put the disruption on hold while fixing and rebuilding what is needed to keep our habitat fit for our species, and if some kind of safety mechanism would be invented to ensure that whatever they might accidentally break next, it will not be life itself,... only then could I easily enjoy and appreciate both ways of life.
archagon
8 hours ago
I am waiting for the online reification of this split with bated breath so that I can fuck off to society #2 and never have to interact with society #1 again.
AlexCoventry
6 hours ago
Isn't society #1 going to outcompeted #2?
soundworlds
5 hours ago
In the short term, probably.
In the long term, probably not.
archagon
6 hours ago
They can do whatever they want. Their cultural output is completely and utterly uninteresting to me.
globalnode
8 hours ago
yeah #1 leeches ideas from #2 and makes all the money, its like a vampire class
bmitc
6 hours ago
(1) will continue to happen because of human behavior and the oligarchy. The oligarchy would love to forget that the time you could call a customer support representative that was native in your language, lived in your country, and actually knew things, more than the computer told them, actually existed. Human behavior forgets it because the Internet and software has added so much "convenience" to life and there's all these new shiny things everywhere.
Way back, finding music wasn't a problem. You went to the store. You talked to people. You didn't need to wait for weeks to get basic doctor's appointments. You could get customer support via an easy phone call. You could drive around and find things just fine.
The U.S. government and people have been more than happy to dehumanize people and themselves by handing over their lifestyles to corporations.
> very fast Innovation and disruption
I don't think people are innovating. They're certainly disrupting in destructive ways. But other than things like improvements in health care and safety in cars, how have things actually and concretely gotten better through all this so-called innovation that happens?
jongjong
8 hours ago
I'm not too worried about it because the first segment of society is doomed to be 'good but never great.'
AI lacks the ability to identify greatness because it's trained on the output of the average person who also lacks this ability.
It's going to create a new elite class of people who have good taste and the masses who have bad taste. Many current elites will end up with the masses. They may retain their wealth on paper, but it will be a cheap, low-quality existence but they will be convinced it's luxury.
I think eventually, everyone will get what they want, but not everyone will get what they need.
lorecore
8 hours ago
Taste is subjective, authenticity is not. People in #2 want human created content, even if it's not as "good".
jongjong
8 hours ago
My definition of bad taste is; will be derivative. These people will consume variants of the same thing over and over, not realizing it to be the case. They will be narrow minded and predictable. They will be afraid of any other ideas which doesn't fit the acceptable pattern of their tribe.
bmitc
6 hours ago
I replied above, but they're already like this.
jongjong
6 hours ago
True but I don't think we've reached the limit.
This is why I advocate for people to spend some time outside in nature and try to do something different once in a while because it's so easy to get stuck in a really small bubble. Especially when you exist in an entirely man-made, soon-to-be fully AI-controlled environment. You may lose your ability to have novel thoughts.
Some people are already there but the range of thoughts seems to be narrowing.
My biggest fear is being caught up in such group for financial reasons and trying to navigate some kind of linguistic and conceptual minefield everyday. I already encountered a situation like that twice in my career. Very tense environment. Feels like you're in a brainwashing cult and have to pretend to be one of them; it's really hard to pretend to be ignorant of certain kinds of information when you don't know what the full range of forbidden ideas is. Saying the wrong things got me fired both times; differences in our mental conditioning created very subtle tension/discomfort between me and management.
They will tolerate people who are 'running a simpler program' than themselves but they will absolutely not tolerate someone with a broader programming. Hence you have to pretend to be narrow-minded which is hard to maintain. This is why I like remote work.
bmitc
6 hours ago
The elites already have bad taste. They aren't going anywhere without tax and financial reform and the return of political donation regulation.
JohnBooty
7 hours ago
This dichotomy is so false.
However else you feel, AI is a force multiplier, and that can also REALLY benefit "Artisanal work + Small Business"
I feel like the "one person app creator" business is so much more viable than it has been since Web 1.0
Five years ago, to run your own solo business in this space, you had to know most of the following: taxes, legal, backend, frontend, devops, iOS dev, Android dev, and marketing and then pay through the nose for most of the ones you didn't. AI helps to paper over a LOT of those gaps... and you can spend more time doing the shit that matters to your business.
You also needed time and lots of it, which is perhaps easy to come by if you're a trust fund baby or independently wealthy and don't have to work for a living but if you have a job and/or family is in extremely short supply
I used to run an online community on the side and I spent SO MUCH TIME doing IT/legal/finance drudgework that could have been spent, you know, engaging with the community and actually improving the product... that "artisinal work" for a "small business" you think you love.
There are of course major major problems with AI, like environmental concerns and others, but dichotomies like yours are not the way forward. At least not a good way forward.
casualgaming226
6 hours ago
> However else you feel, AI is a force multiplier, and that can also REALLY benefit "Artisanal work + Small Business"
> Five years ago, to run your own solo business in this space, you had to know most of the following: taxes, legal, backend, frontend, devops, iOS dev, Android dev, and marketing and then pay through the nose for most of the ones you didn't. AI helps to paper over a LOT of those gaps... and you can spend more time doing the shit that matters to your business.
How is running a business in the way you've just described artisanal? You're basically saying we should be outsourcing all of these things to AIs, which is simply not artisanal.
hakfoo
3 hours ago
As I understand it, we used to have the concept of "hiring workers" or "contracting for services".
The benefit of this was that when Internal Revenue called and said in lieu of a tax return, you sent a takeaway menu covered in pornographic drawings, you could reach out to the person you paid and expect them to take accountability.
Instead, we're getting :sparkles: You're absolutely right! I shouldn't have sent the taxman the Goatse picture, would you like me to try something else? :sparkles:
Anon1096
8 hours ago
Calling #2 more sustainable has no basis in reality, it's just a feeling. It's like saying that clothing before the loom or farming before the tractor were "more sustainable". No, it isn't, it just appeals to yeoman farmer instincts that somehow technology=bad when it's what powers (and sustains) our modern world of 8 billion people.
tw04
7 hours ago
Given that #1 seems to be based almost entirely on stealing from #2, and never paying reparations, I’d say it’s pretty unsustainable.
It’s like saying robbing banks for a living isn’t sustainable and working at a bank is. That’s not exactly a stretch.
fc417fc802
7 hours ago
#1 may well put #2 out of a living but that isn't the same as stealing and doesn't (at least in and of itself) make it unsustainable. The fact that models were trained on scraped content isn't a matter of technical necessity but rather the path of least resistance (lowest cost in this case). Synthetic data is increasingly used for reasons of quantity, quality, and various technical considerations.
tw04
7 hours ago
All of the major players in AI currently, literally stole to build their models. There isn’t one out there that hasn’t. So yes, it is the same as stealing because they were LITERALLY, in the literal sense, stealing.
fc417fc802
7 hours ago
Well, pirated. Piracy and stealing aren't the same thing.
Regardless, I acknowledged the general issue. However I pointed out that doing so was not a technical necessity. If you base your worldview or actions around X implying Y but then it turns out that actually Y was merely a matter of convenience you're probably going to arrive at a wrong conclusion.
There's also the issue where you're emphatically calling it stealing without providing a clear criteria. The legal system as a whole has yet to conclusively resolve the various piracy accusations. The legality of consuming publicly available content remains quite controversial.
tw04
7 hours ago
It absolutely is a technical necessity. You could build a model from scratch today without doing the same thing. And every model attempting to train on AI generated output degrades into nonsense almost immediately.
There’s a reason Reddit is making millions of dollars letting these companies mine their human generated content. You think OpenAI or anyone else would pay for that if they could just cyclically train on AI generated content???
fc417fc802
7 hours ago
> attempting to train on AI generated output
I said nothing about that. Good synthetic data does not (typically) involve ML algorithms. Although that might be changing.
I'll politely suggest that you go read the literature before engaging further.
Reddit, Twitter, and similar are valuable because the data covers current events. Their content makes up a reasonably comprehensive timeline of the world at large. You don't need that to train a barebones functional model but it's certainly useful in order to train a knowledgeable one. Regardless, if they're charging for access it clearly isn't piracy so it doesn't seem like your original objection would hold any water in that case.
tw04
5 hours ago
> I'll politely suggest that you go read the literature before engaging further.
Which commercial AI vendor has not stolen any content when creating their models? I’ll wait.
Which commercial AI vendor has created their models exclusively training on datasets created and created by other AI?
> Regardless, if they're charging for access it clearly isn't piracy so it doesn't seem like your original objection would hold any water in that case.
Given that they were previously violating the site’s terms of service when scraping the content: yes, they were absolutely stealing.
andyfilms1
7 hours ago
It's sustainable in the literal sense, I.E. a tailor can simply tailor forever without needing to constantly worry about keeping up with new tools or technologies, or needing to upgrade or change their methodology constantly.
The tech world is obsessed with moving fast and breaking things, and you can't just do the same thing forever and expect it to always work.
Karrot_Kream
7 hours ago
Think about how much food we throw away in the developed and developing worlds. How often we buy new clothing when we could mend old clothing. How often we ask for more when we could do with less. How often we want to eat at a restaurant when we could make leftovers. How often we want something sweet when we could just eat something bland. How often we heat and cool our homes when we could wear more or less clothing.
It turns out that while these are all truisms, nobody wants to fix them. Developed countries are okay passing pigovian taxes, to a limited extent, to help fix these problems. Developing countries are even less interested in fixing these problems. It turns out that austerity is incredibly unpopular. Everyone wants to tell other people not to do the things they don't like but nobody wants to listen to what other people tell them not to do.
Just a reminder that Europe colonized Asia, Africa, and the Americas in the search for spices. Later on the interest changed to tea. Literally the only thing that Europe wanted was better tasting food and drink (initially at least.) By the time the potato had become widespread, they could have had enough calories to feed the continent, and yet the desire for flavor is what lead to untold misery for hundreds of years for millions of people.
We need to be realistic about what works and what doesn't. Austerity never wins.
sonofhans
7 hours ago
“More sustainable” than burning hydrocarbons to produce chatbot tokens. Humanity could sustain itself on those resources much longer if we were more careful with them. The very definition of sustainability.
bandrami
2 hours ago
The bigger issue is that the AI we currently have available has been produced by setting a giant pile of money on fire with no real plan for ever earning it back. And that is not sustainable because at some point the checks dry up. We have zero idea what the economics of unsubsidized inference are because we still don't actually know how much money the frontier labs are currently losing.
phoronixrly
7 hours ago
It allows for our modern unsustainable world of 8 billion people you mean?
barnabee
9 hours ago
Needs to be inverted.
Tax excess tech profits that derive from the efforts of others and use the proceeds to fund living artists.
Vaguely analogous to levies on blank cassettes that went to offset piracy. Give the money directly to actual artists, not labels/publishers, though.
wahnfrieden
9 hours ago
You’re describing a social revolution. Otherwise there is no way that leaders whose power over us corrupts them would want to put that into law.
The cassette reference was a tax on consumers to send money upward. What you’re describing is the complete inverse.
lkrubner
8 hours ago
No, it is exactly the same thing. The tax on cassettes raised money that was given to artists.
wahnfrieden
4 hours ago
Thanks for correcting
jpkw
9 hours ago
At least for art - I don't think you'll find anyone who actually enjoys art hanging up anything produced by AI on their walls. For these kinds of "customers", they could equally easily frame & hang up a poster of the Mona Lisa. Artists are not at threat, if anything, AI makes original artworks more precious & enjoyable.
smoe
8 hours ago
My worry is that, at least among the artists I know, many kept themselves afloat early career by doing commercial freelance jobs like illustrations for local events or companies. Those kinds of jobs might largely vanish.
On the other hand, with the internet inevitably becoming swamped by AI generated content, I can definitely see a de-digitalization of art moving into offline spaces. At least for independent work, you don’t necessarily need mass appeal or exposure, but rather access to individuals and small groups with an actual willingness to pay for art.
px43
7 hours ago
That's not art though, and while it might have paid a small amount of money, it can also be incredibly degrading and soul crushing. That's the kind of work that AI tools are doing now. Those jobs should vanish. People shouldn't need to degrade themselves for money, we can have a system where people are generally taken care of, and the people who build extra cool shit can live even better.
crote
6 hours ago
> That's not art though
Why not? Would you also argue that most of the works by painters like Rembrandt, such as The Night Watch aren't art - just because they were contracted to make it? Does book cover art stop being art the second a book's title gets placed on it?
And sure, plenty of corporate work is boring and soulless. But the worst of that switched to spending 10 minutes with clipart and PowerPoint decades ago: if you were still hiring an artist, you cared at least a little about what the result looked like, which means there was at least some space for artistic vision.
> People shouldn't need to degrade themselves for money, we can have a system where people are generally taken care of
We should, but we don't. What's your proposal for letting artists grow and mature while paying their bills in the meantime? AI is currently killing their "degrading" jobs, do you think forcing them to take a shift at McDonald's is going to help their artistic career advance?
chronogamous
4 hours ago
Rembrandt would argue that he was a craftsman, although some of the liberties he took in stuffing his paintings with hidden innuendo and symbolic jokes at the expense of some of his clients, definitely makes many of his paintings works of art.
Alas, only when taking a shirt at MacDonald's becomes equaly obsolete, and it has been made apparent that any task or job humans do could also be done by technology, only then will it help the artist in your example with their artistic career.
It is remarkable, when you think about it, that artists seem to be the first people that are made to feel obsolete. There are plenty of jobs that could have been fully automated, steampunk-style, from the moment the industrial revolution took hold.
Maybe it becomes slightly less remarkable if you take into consideration that collecting/investing in art has always been an integral part of people of considerable wealth. Even if they did not care much for it, didn't understand any of it, or were only motivated for the money,... regardless of your field, being very wealthy forced you into developing at least some connection with art. The billionaires in tech all seem to be an exception to this rule, and their lack of any connection with art, may have made them feel that art is easiest of all to replace using generative software. And for them, this was probably true - and they lack the connection to have developed any taste or eye for quality in art, so they're easily pleased with something a computer makes for them.
If only the artists are actively excluded though, people in other jobs will never fully appreciate that given the effort, their job is just as easily automated. Once people in every possible job have been made to feel just as obsolete, the world may be ready to order itself based on individual preference and mutual appreciation of whatever it is you choose to do 'for a living'.
aussieguy1234
5 hours ago
I suppose with those same artists, at least for the smarter members of the group, might start using AI for basic commercial freelance jobs and just act as the human review, perhaps doing some final adjustments to the finished artwork.
So instead of being paid a small amount of money for something that they spend hours on, they create 10 artworks in that same number of hours and earn 10x what they did previously.
wolvesechoes
8 minutes ago
> I suppose with those same artists, at least for the smarter members of the group, might start using AI for basic commercial freelance jobs and just act as the human review, perhaps doing some final adjustments to the finished artwork.
And how they create demand for this? AI "enthusiasts" are enthusiastic about it exactly because they feel they don't need to outsource things to meatbags.
luqtas
4 hours ago
innocent. like demand won't lower prices?
aussieguy1234
4 hours ago
I think you mean supply. Demand usually causes prices to go up.
markdown
7 hours ago
> Those kinds of jobs might largely vanish.
have already largely vanished
yakattak
9 hours ago
That's assuming that the only market is stuff people are hanging up. The games industry, one that already takes advantage of its workers, is going to love this to the detriment of really passionate artists who love their craft and industry.
hibikir
6 hours ago
All complicated commercial art (movies, series, games, music, designed spaces...) has its budget as a key constraint of what is built. You don't get a new season of an anime that looks 4 times better because of a random genius: Someone evaluates the money it will make, and somehow decides that increasing the animation budget will be worthwhile. It was the same when it was animated by hand, with huge cameras and cels, than in modern digital-first animation, and whether it's using plain hand-ish drawn 2d, or using 3d models for some shots. The art is tied to the budget, and maybe the next season the budget is 2/3rds of what it was before, and the technical quality drops (see One Punch Man, Blue Lock and such)
So when an artist looks at AI, it's unlikely to be as a tool that will build a whole piece: Insufficient control, and currently nowhere near good enough to do more than occupy space, like a little painting in a hallway or in a hotel room. But it is something that can be used to better spend the budget in places where it'll be more impactful for the quality of the piece. Not unlike how CGI is often used today in places where it wouldn't have been 20 years ago, and it's aiming to be invisible. Not because the shot was impossible, but because it's cheaper.
Treating AI in art as a moral thing will end up being like the people being against synthesizers in the 80s: It's a viable creative choice for some things, but ultimately not a good expectation for industry direction. Ultimately the vast majority of art is commercial, and we'll see shortcuts being taken for budgetary reasons. Nobody is manually animating every detail of every mesh in a game like this was Toy Story. And even though doing that would produce more work for artists, it wouldn't make better games, really. And we'd sure have far fewer of them.
paulhebert
8 hours ago
Lots of illustrator jobs for businesses too
HDThoreaun
8 hours ago
genAI is going to be great for indie games. Solo productions are much easier to produce and will only get easier as tooling improves. I sort of see this as a spotify moment I guess. A democratizing force that will allow many more people to get paid for their art but with much less job security and often as a second job. Whether that's a good thing is certainly up for debate but I think as a consumer it's probably good for me.
yakattak
8 hours ago
Gamers don’t like AI.[1][2] I actually think indie studios that don’t use AI will do better than ones that do.
1: https://www.ign.com/articles/larian-ceo-responds-to-divinity...
2: https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/clair-obscur-expedition-33-ai...
px43
7 hours ago
Gamers don't like lazy slop. I've played quite a few games that utilized AI tooling to build them, and had a lot of fun.
noobermin
7 hours ago
I think the context makes it clear this is about llms and generative ai, not everything that includes a NN
HDThoreaun
8 hours ago
Both your articles are from big companies. I think what gamers dont like is big game companies replacing jobs. Solo creators and small teams using AI can create stuff that would never exist otherwise. I also think the whole anti ai thing is a fad though so maybe Im projecting. Im also not convinced that articles like this represent majority opinion.
bpavuk
8 hours ago
well, GenAI is an ultimate prototyping machine. I keep repeating that so often that autocomplete on my phone already learned it. look at Clair Obscur - this game did use GenAI internally for textures and forgot to clean up in ONE place. they were sorry for that and thanked the community for pointing out. naturally, Twitter and Bluesky went equally mad at Sandfall just for the mere fact of usage, but that didn't disqualify them from The Game Awards, as you can tell from how many awards they got.
Expedition 33 nailed music, aesthetics, and narrative, and I am glad that they took a diffusion model for what it is, not for what marketing wants you to believe. although the game itself would benefit from one or two months dedicated exclusively to optimization, it is THE reference of how generative technology can be used - purely internally, to ideate and iterate at the pace of your taste and a bunch of H200s. we are aware of that process detail purely because they slipped in one place and got briefly "owned" by Twitter.
myrrhman
6 hours ago
I think this is only true in a vague and abstract way. In reality, AI devalues labor (in general) and the worth of artists (in specific).
Good art requires good patronage and institutional support in turn. No one will have time to produce the next Mona Lisa if they're barely able to make end's meet working a slavish factory job. That's doubly true when the vocations that supported artists—either antiquated, modern, or contemporary (painter, typesetter, graphic designer, etc.)—vanish because AI can do "just about as well."
Art isn't just a divine presence gracing the souls of those deemed most worthy, it's a collection of skills and knowledge that must be built by community over decades of struggle.
On top of the generation of slop, AI is removing some of the final protections that hold these pillars up. That is what should keep us up at night.
crote
6 hours ago
> Artists are not at threat, if anything, AI makes original artworks more precious & enjoyable.
Sure, but how are you going to find it?
I've got a print of some digital work by Simon Stålenhag on my wall. I discovered his work because I was was mesmerized by an image of his on some wallpaper sharing website, ages ago.
These days that kind of website is 99% AI slop. AI has made it impossible to stumble across art: either you consume what the big corporations are feeding the masses, or you have to already be part of a strongly-curated niche art community.
beloch
7 hours ago
There seem to be two possibilities:
1. AI can't do some things humans can, and that doesn't change.
2. AI turns into something that can do everything. Humans become unnecessary.
We're currently at #1. Google may want to keep you in their AI playpen so all your clicks can be monetized directly to them, but they still need the data humans are creating. They're just not paying for it.
In world #1, humans will get less work, but creative and original work will still be valued because AI can't do it. There will, of course, need to be support for all the people striving to create such work while they're gaining the skills to do so. In world #2, humans are getting no work. Neither one of these worlds functions if all the proceeds of work go to a small number of billionaires. Wealth will need to be redistributed so people can live and, if still necessary, do the things AI can't.
Regulations need to catch up with what Google is trying to do here. It's currently theft and, even if we reach the point where they no longer need to crawl the web for input to their AI, their wealth will need to be redistributed. Sucking the entirety of human knowledge into a LLM and then profiting off of it without paying the humans who created that knowledge is not a business model that can remain legal for long.
pjmlp
2 hours ago
Additionally, the only developers allowed to work as such, are the ones employed at such corporations, everyone else though luck.
overgard
9 hours ago
I imagine it'll take a functional legal body to do this IE maybe europe, but I think there should be a legally binding set of metadata you can attach to images to specify that they must not be used for training (with real penalties if companies are caught)
noobermin
7 hours ago
Of course just like they did with engineering IP china will not respect such a thing.
zoom6628
7 hours ago
Agree. Should be legally required for all web hosted pictures to be AI poisoned except with explicit verifiable opt out. Same for text.
Needs some institution with many geek supporters and or large tools, like Wikipedia or EFF to wage a campaign of scanning the web for materials used without permission and then loading the courts with cases of probable non-consensual usage. May not change billionaire behaviour but perhaps will change consumer behaviour.
Frieren
2 hours ago
> only the large corporations can make money from content.
It is an aristocratic tax. Nobility has the right to profit on everything that the peasants produce. The peasants can keep enough to survive, everything else should be extracted.
The middle ages didnt happen because people was stupid but because there is a pressure for the money elite to extract as much value as possible. Democracy was designed to control that bad outcome, but the new aristocracy (billionaires, CEOs, etc.) is trying to kill democracy for good.
If the average working class Joe wants to have something more than scraps we are going to need to take power back and fix democracy.
Google is just a symptom of the disease.
nicbou
9 hours ago
No money and no audience.
Recognition and gratitude keeps me going. Money pays the bills, but if that was the only concern, I'd still be a software developer.
Anonymously feeding the slop machine is nothing like it.
georgeecollins
7 hours ago
As someone (like other who have posted) who has made my living my whole life making art/ code, this is completely wrong!
What it threatened is the ad based "content" models where you put stuff up for free and sell ads against it. There's lots of ways to make money from any creative endeavor that has a lasting audience. I don't know if that includes talking into your phone or writing a personal journal about productivity hacks.
Things you make that are really good: a novel, a game, a short film, a song are still very valuable.
Falimonda
7 hours ago
This is hyperscale remix culture. AI is an accelerant. Find things that cannot be accelerated!
metrognome
8 hours ago
The rhetoric of this comment seems to imply that this is a bad thing, but is it really? If it becomes more difficult to make money through creative endeavors, then that leaves us with fewer reasons to be creative other than for the sake of self-expression... which is what we want, right?
scared_together
7 hours ago
If self-expression doesn’t put food on the table, it will become monopolized by those who were already well-fed doing something else.
Forgeties79
5 hours ago
That only works in a society that doesn’t put such a high premium on productivity as it is defined by how much revenue it generates and vague notions of class (“this is a real job, that is not a real job). We shit on people who work jobs we need/utilize the services of despite the fact that they work as hard as any of us do because we’re too good for that work. The defining factors? We pay them poorly, they get no PTO or parental leave, etc. Because we don’t value them. It’s a vicious feedback loop.
We saw this in the 80’s through 2000’s. All parents told their kids was “go to college or you’ll become a mechanic.” Then everyone went to college at all costs and then they were told “well that’s what you get for taking on loans for college. Should’ve been sensible and gone to trade school to become a mechanic.”
Of course this is never their kid. Their kid was supposed to college. Everyone else was supposed to go to trade school.
I highly recommend everyone read the comic Godshaper. It’s 2 trades (10 or 12 issues can’t remember) and it highlights this dynamic in a way that is impossible to overstate.
lofaszvanitt
6 hours ago
Sometimes I have the feeling people here are actually braindead or pretending to be or lots of bots around. Anyway. How do you self express yourself without money? And without an audience?
EvanAnderson
7 hours ago
I would assume the publishing industry loves this.
lofaszvanitt
6 hours ago
Well people need to wake up and make their own ventures and vote with their wallets.
archagon
8 hours ago
I’m itching for some sort of no-training license:
This content must not be used for training or refining generative AI. If it is, rest assured that if and when the regulatory environment around training data shifts in any country where we have legal standing, we will pursue legal action.
Maybe even with a class action element: any lawsuit stemming from a violation of this license shall cover all other violations at the same time.
Forgeties79
9 hours ago
A big corporation using LLM’s to pump out lazy “art” gets the exact same scrutiny from me.
