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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

Its similar to many other dilemmas with new tech.

When you are out in public, you don't have an expectation of privacy. People can see you, they can take photos of you. The worker at the cafe will probably remember you and your order. This is fine. But when tech does the exact same thing but with scale where everywhere you go, everything you buy, etc is tracked and analyzed, it's now questionably immoral despite legally being fine.

That's how generative AI is to me. Its doing something people have been doing themselves forever, but now it's doing it faster and easier than ever before which changes the equation. The arguments of "its not real creativity" are a coping mechanism. We are upset that something that was previously quite unobtainable behind years of learning and hours of effort is now trivially accessible to anyone with a computer.

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The timescales matter as well.

You or I could perhaps, if we dedicated a few years to it, make a convincing fake video of an acquaintance of ours doing or saying something. By the end of those few years it'd likely be out of date or maybe just irrelevant. And they'd have to have really, really upset us in order for us to put that much effort in. It would literally cost us tens, hundreds of thousands or more in opportunity cost.

Contrast that with some sort of tool that's not too far advanced from current image/video generators that can just do the same in a minute by typing "A video of my next door neighbour accepting cash in a briefcase from a man in a suit".

I like this example and I'd agree that tracking people at scale can be immoral depending on the circumstances. But to me it feels that way because something is being taken from you. You've lost your agency to be anonymous or to leave your past behind.

But I don't see how an LLM training on your works deprives you of something you had before.

> deprives you of something you had before.

it does in some sense - your exclusive knowledge of the subject matter is now transferrable via LLM or some sort of ai model.

For a human to achieve the same, they would've needed to undertake similar amounts of training, effort and dedication as you had. The number of people who would do such is currently small.

So realistically, your value as someone who has this unique expert subject knowledge is diminished.

However, these individual losses are offset by the greater good that the LLM/ai models would generate. It is exactly equivalent to the luddite's arguments about why they would not want the textile machines to replace them.

artists put their artwork online, let people use these in an acceptable range. usually, learning (not copy) from it is acceptable. but there are more controversy around generating million artwork have same personal style, let artists lose job and let their families starve.

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