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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

Is this any worse than assembly-line journalism, where writers are churning out low-quality content en masse?

It's different in one way in particular: AI-generated content is in the public domain in the US, since copyright isn't applicable until a human's creative input occurs. That's either better or worse, depending on your viewpoint!

That's not really how it works.

That'd be like saying all oil paintings are in the public domain because paintbrushes can't hold copyright. The copyright goes to the person triggering the generation of the content similar to how if you use blur tool in photoshop you don't suddenly lose copyright.

Maybe that will be the case in future after a court decides so, but at present AI content does not get copyright protection.

https://www.klgates.com/Federal-Court-Rules-Work-Generated-b...

> Maybe that will be the case in future after a court decides so, but at present AI content does not get copyright protection.

That's not what the article says.

The article says that an AI cannot hold copyright. This is not the same as AI content cannot be copyrighted. As I said before, a paintbrush cannot hold copyright; that does not mean a painter who used a paintbrush can't hold the copyright to the work.

This is basically the same thing as when that guy left a camera out and PETA tried to get the monkey that took the photo to be assigned copyright [1]. PETA failed; animals cannot hold copyright and the guy that left his camera out can.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/judge-says-monke...

That's a common legal hypothesis that's been suggested regarding AI. Has any US court accepted the 'paintbrush' argument as applying to AI-created works?

You're forgetting that the guy who left the camera out for the monkeys to take pictures with had his copyright claim denied. He subsequently made some money from a book about the project and selling the rights for a documentary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

I suppose it's the last little fig leaf being blown away (by the combined blast of two thousand NVIDIA Tesla A100 cooling fans).

Yes, because it's faster and cheaper. You can now just outright create thousands of spam articles in an hour, or less, with only one person using prompts. SEO spam is already horrendous and is making search engines worse, publishers using this outright spam to both game SEO and advertisers is not great, imo. The problem is that there is plenty of backlash on bigger players doing this, but no one cares about smaller players doing it. Eventually that puts bigger players at a disadvantage, and they'll have to also start doing it enmasse. I think that's why we see them all slowly dipping their toes.

Seems fundamentally dishonest, which makes it worse regardless of quality..no?

There is also a ton of stuff that has more or less formulaic sections where a person can cut and paste paragraphs that they could have written had they spent more time. This is what I've found ChatGPT/Bard somewhat useful for. I may reject. I will certainly selectively extract sections. I'll augment. But they can give me some useful material to provide background and otherwise flesh out the meat of a piece.

Kind of, because now 1 person can do the job of hundreds, or thousands, and now you'd either have to:

1. Invent new (bullshit) jobs for the thousands to do

2. Pay those thousands money to live (basic income)

3. Send them off to die, fighting for you and the 1 person commanding the AI, in the next major armed conflict

They could also find work doing something more productive.

This is the same challenge that humanity has faced since the invention of the wheel.

Some of the writers may have been trying to work up to better jobs.

No, technology is accelerating faster than people's ability to adapt to it, which was not always the case.

I’ve been considering this as the “complexity crisis”.

The 1960 high school dropout could work at Jiffy Lube and excel. Even to one point owning the store.

The 2020 high school dropout at Jiffy Lube has the attention span of a goldfish, pumped up on drugs his entire life, needs to know between this tool for this vehicle, that this brand needs this, that there are now 200 different oils, and no matter what happens even if he did excel that the store will be sold to a VC firm that will knock it down to put up a cheaply made 6-plex where three of the units are full time tax-free Airbnb rentals.

We have/are absolutely exceeding the ability of everyone, let alone the below average.

Half the time I look at what I need to know and wonder how most people are getting by.

And why not real jobs for the thousands? Why does it have to be bullshit jobs?

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