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Comment by 000ooo000 | Hacker News Reader

>Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment.

Why should you be free of accountability for the effects of your actions?

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Because the effects of my actions in this case have yet to be demonstrated, let alone shown to cause harm. The author claims there is expoititive harm to labor, the environment, and maybe others. That is not at all obvious or provably true yet. As I said, I'm open to the discussion, but I can't defend myself in good faith when people claim some slam dunk moral certitude. Again, don't use generative AI if it makes you feel bad, but there is absolutely nothing clear cut yet about this radically brand new technology.

The flip side of that coin is brazen "ingenuity" with complete disregard for the consequences is just as bad as blindly declaring all AI is bad.

We need people like the person writing this article so the starry eyed people who are too excited about AI and pushing it into everything are kept in check.

>The author claims there is expoititive harm to labor [...]. That is not at all obvious or provably true yet.

Not at all obvious? These models are trained on vast amounts of content, much of it copyrighted, and basically none of it licensed.

Human artists have been training on the same content for decades and no one seemed to complain. You can argue that machines should be held to a different set of legal and ethical standards, but it's certainly not obvious.

Most factories are designed based on vast amounts of prior manual labor, so it's not like "automating a manual process based on analyzing existing methods" is new, either. Why is it okay to automate the knowledge of all those other craftsmen, but not that of painters?

AI are not human artists, so there's no connection to your point and the discussion.

you are just making shit up to suit your narrative at this point.

So ai are human artists?

You could just as easily claim that since AI are not human artists that copyright does not apply to them.

It applies to whoever uses them as a tool. If you say copyright doesn't apply to a photocopier because it isn't human that doesn't mean it suddenly doesn't apply to you. It's just a bad argument.

Human artists are not robotically ingesting terabytes of content.

Correct, not at all obvious. The obvious effect of generating an image of a dog on the moon is that you now have an image of a dog on the moon. If you showed it to 100 artists, some percentage of them might recognize it's AI, but none of them would claim it as their art and ultimately none would be harmed. The harm is non-obvious.

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