this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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I stand by my opinion that learning systems training on copyrighted materials isn't the problem, it's companies super eager to replace human workers with automation (or replace skilled workers with cheaper, unskilled workers). The problem is, every worker not working is another adult (and maybe some kids) not eating and not paying rent.
(And for those of you soulless capitalists out there, people without food and shelter is bad. That's a thing we won't tolerate and start looking at you lean-and-hungry-like when it happens. That's what gets us thinking about guillotines hungry for aristocrats.)
In my ideal world, everyone would have food, shelter, clothes, entertainment and a general middle-class lifestyle whether they worked or not, and intellectual-property temporary monopolies would be very short and we'd have a huge public domain. I think the UN wants to be on the same page as me, but the United States and billionaires do not.
All we'd have to worry about is the power demands of AI and cryptomining, which might motivate us to get pure-hydrogen fusion working. Or just keep developing solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power until everyone can run their AC and supercomputer.
I mean it's the heart of the issue.
OpenAI isn't even the big issue regarding this. It's other companies that are developing and training specialized LLMs on their own employees. These companies have the capital to take the loss on the project because in their eyes it'll eventually turn into a gain as long as they get it right eventually.
GPT and OpenAI is just a minor distraction in regards to what is being cooked up behind the scenes, but I still wouldn't give them a free pass for that either.
This has nothing to do with copyright.
It does. If the AI firms lose, the laws around copyrights tighten and major copyright holders profit. If they win, they get to do what they please and nobody can stop them. Either way, the public loses.
Piracy is already considered illegal and persecuted by authorities, so nothing changes for the public in the first case.
There are exclusions to copyrights accepted under fair use which could easily be tightened if major copyright holders (like Disney) have their way.
Did not know that, then we are f*** either way. Boycott them all, and a pirate's life for me then.
I agree this is the real problem. (And also shit like Microsoft's "now I can attend three meetings at once" ad) However:
The industries whose works are being used for training are on the front lines of efforts to replace human workers with AI - writers and visual artists.
The industries whose works are being used for training are on the front lines of efforts to replace human workers with AI - writers and visual artists.
Much the way musicians were on the front line when recording was becoming a thing and movies were turning into talkies. But that's the most visible pushout. We're also seeing clerical work getting automated, and once autonomous vehicles become mastered, freight and courier work (driving freight is like a third of the US workforce).
This is much the same way that GMO technology is fine (and will be necessary) but the way Monsanto has been using it as DRM for seeds is unethical.
I think attacking the technology itself doesn't serve to address the unethical part, and kicks the can down the line to where the fight is going to be more intense. But yes, we haven't found our Mahsa Amini moment to justify nationwide general strikes.
As someone who dabbles in sociology (unaccredited), it's vexed me that we can't organize general strikes (or burning down precincts) until enough people die unjustly and horribly, and even then it's not predictable what will do it. For now it means as a species we're going gentle into multiple good nights.
I can't tell for most of your post if you are agreeing with me, disagreeing with me, or just adding more info. However, I entirely agree with this bit here from you that I quoted.
1 Monsanto doesn't even exist anymore
2 With the amount of AI money going into AI trucking, we could've bought more rail which is inherently automatable.
Rail works at the inter-county scale, but not in local distribution, and self-driving AI is not limited just to trucks, but also extends to couriers that can follow pedestrians (at least to include ramps and elevators. I'd be interesting if little dogs -- the robots -- are used for couriers.) So it's not just truckers but all mail and delivery occupations that are threatened in the coming decade.
For now, the pinch seems to be getting autonomous cars to interact with human-driven automotive traffic, as we already have clerical robots that can be tolerably not-annoying to fellow pedestrians and clerks in a work environment.
If we were actually striving for post-scarcity communism, this would be a major step in letting common workers become artists (with the free time they have after partitioning out jobs that cannot yet be automated) but instead our ownership class is looking for a blast furnace by which to direct the workers they no longer need for their vanity projects.
Phh, people without food and work can go to the ~~Venus~~ X-enus mining company.