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Comment by dangerwill | Hacker News Reader

Why would you think artists will be able to sell licenses at a sustainable level for their voices? The whole point of these generative AI models is to avoid paying for human labor so the industry will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do so. We have already seen all of these projects actively avoid paying for their training data, either by just not caring about copywrite or by using only fully open source training data.

If the RIAA takes openAI, et al to court and wins then we may see licenses for this, but given the pittance that spotify pays now for streams, we should expect any license revenue to be utterly minimal for all but the biggest artists.

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There are lots of very talented struggling singers and musicians around the world who make $0 with their skills.

They would be happy to get $1000 for signing away their amazing voice and music talent for a large corp who can spend $1 Billion collecting all kinds of voices.

If Mega Corp hires someone who can imitate Elvis and if they use it in their training data, it is completely fair game

Yeah and why do you think that a Mega Corp would be willing to spend $1k per musician when they could offer $100? This hypothetical Mega Corp will surely prefer getting 10 million samples instead of 1 million samples for their $1 billion. In this situation they have all the leverage and we can't rely on their largesse

And it is definitely better to have a super low chance of breaking through in the future and $0 in your pocket than to have no chance of breaking through ever and $1k in your pocket (gone in 1-2 months of rent). Especially considering for most of the really struggling artists, they won't get that deal at all and instead it will be $1k in the pocket of a studio musician.

Once again, for every artist that rejects the $1000 sign-away-for-lifetime offer there are a 1000 who will accept.

Also at the end of the day, every human needs to offer what is value to the society. So even though I'm an extremely good pen-twirler, if the society doesn't value that, I need to change bedsheets (which is more valuable) to make money.

So, I'm not sure why you need to protect "great voice" over "great pen-twirling" skills

Except that having a great singing voice involves lots of practice and maintenance and people dedicate their lives to it, and until now society has valued that enough for it to be economically viable for some. And now this new tech comes along and threatens to undercut that skill for the sake of capturing a market. What happens when a large swath of previously valued skills (including software engineering) are significantly automated, not on the order of decades (like what happened with auto manufacturing) but on the order of a couple years? What happens when there are nowhere near enough jobs to employ the current population? I don't see a mass movement for a UBI to be paired with AI driven job losses, and the only alternative is finding new work for people or having people starve in the street. Our society is terrible at finding adequate replacement work for people who have been automated out of a career. We didn't find replacement work for the auto industry and the "technology always generates new work for people" line is a canard in the face of AI taking over knowledge work. If generative AI fulfills the current expectations for it, there will be no possible job for a human to do that an AI can't do better.

We are sleepwalking into an economic, societal, and political catastrophe and all this forum gets excited about is how much faster and efficient (critically though, not better or more resilient) production systems can become.

If society doesn't owe you a living because your skills now have the same value as "great pen twirling", what you are arguing for is mass death.

Reality says we have more Job openings than ever and the lowest unemployment rate.

I can't find a decent plumber, lawn mower, handyman or a doctor. If the economic incentives pushes artists to acquire skills that are useful to society then we should accelerate that process rather than artificially propping up their skills with debt we can't service.

There will be a time for UBI, but that day hasn't come (Unemployment and Job Openings will be a clear indicator) of that.

Imagine if we propped up textile workers or blacksmith or shoe repairer just like we are planning to prop up artists, the world would be much worse.

Today anyone born in a Western Democracy has access to basic needs -- food, shelter, knowledge without having to do anything.

> Today anyone born in a Western Democracy has access to basic needs -- food, shelter, knowledge without having to do anything.

I'm sorry but this is just not true. The US has ~600k homeless people, the UK had over 2 million people make use of food banks last year (up from ~25k in 2008), and almost all Western nations are seeing metrics around quality of life decline. This isn't AI's doing of course, but we are not in a worry-free position here. Western European countries have a good/decent social safety net, but the Anglo-sphere is far less generous to its poor.

> I can't find a decent plumber, lawn mower, handyman or a doctor. If the economic incentives pushes artists to acquire skills that are useful to society then we should accelerate that process rather than artificially propping up their skills with debt we can't service.

Retraining in midlife is no easy task, and especially so for doctors. Becoming a doctor entails taking on massive amounts of medical school debt and extremely brutal hours until you hit residency. It's a path that is only reasonable for the dedicated and the young, not for a non medical professional like a musician or software engineer in their mid 30s and over.

As for plumbers, yard work, house work, electricians, etc, yes I agree those won't be easily automated away and they don't have the financial up front cost of a medical profession. But there are >25 million office workers (https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-occupation.ht... between the Management occupations, Business and financial operations occupations, and Computer and mathematical occupations buckets) in this country who are at short term risk of being automated away. If GPT-[X] fulfills the hype, then let's say half of those jobs go away quickly due to a 100% gain in per worker productivity. That becomes 13 million unemployed people and an unemployment rate over 11% (2008 peaked at 10.6%). That becomes a major recession or depression rather quickly.

And as always for people in positions of privilege telling those under the boot to just change their profession, you first. Quit your cushy software job and help fix the labor shortage you see in plumbing.

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