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Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

I swear that the displaced artist writer mafia is pulling all the stops to try and write low grade hit pieces and AI doomer narratives.

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Is it? Or is tech folks finding out that they're the baddies and not happy with their reality hitting that of the rest of society? I think it's the latter, but only history will tell.

"Tech Is Not Your Friend" would've been more apropos, hype cycles and all that (adtech, crypto, gen AI, etc). Just cut the "changing the world" facade (not wrong! just not for the better in a lot of cases) and come right out with "we're extracting from the economy like wall street, but with code instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39811287 ("HN: Do artifacts have politics?")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39811085 (valuable subthread on the above citation)

Tech folks the baddies for improving tech? No.

Tech leaders the baddies for abusing tech? Maybe.

Government leaders the baddies for allowing the above free reign in all instances and allowing the sheer monetisation of the tech+data siphon? Yes.

Capitalism is to blame, not tech. The system would pervert anything, tech just happens to be profitable.

Some people harm, some do not, all exist in the system. Excuses are easy ("the system made me do it"), despite free will and executive function. I admit, more effort is needed to close the gap to make harmful people less harmful, considering imperfection of the system.

The “system” does not exist in vacuum. It is powered by the same people that would power other systems such as socialism, communism, etc. And they all suck even more.

Capitalism is also tech.

Ye olde squares are rectangles logic might apply here. Free open source software is a thing. Proprietary is the product of capitalists, yes, but not all techies are capitalist as proven by releasing FOSS.

Almost invariably the “artists” that are the loudest about how bad generative AI is on social media have 35 followers and make shitty digital “art”, which is mostly anime characters.

Almost: https://catandgirl.com/4000-of-my-closest-friends/

I think its a fair article. How can you tell that AI has been manipulated to make outputs more appealing to make you do certain actions. You could argue that money <-> favor has been long exchanged, but in this case, we don't have someone to name and shame.

AI is a tool, and there are lots of open source models available, you can compare results easily. Corporations don't need to pay to degrade the models, they paid to degrade the internet and got the models as a temporary ad-on, at least until we get better at cleaning large data sets.

No one has been displaced. There's melodramatic doomers lamenting some ostensible future where AI displaces them, and there's tech-novice salt farmers collecting vials of these doomers' tears, but no serious displacement is happening.

"No one has been displaced."

This is a false statement. Any single example is enough to disprove the statement.

Consider this: "There are 36,659 people employed in the Coal Mining industry in the US as of 2023." [1]

Coal mining is in effect a displaced industry, that is hardly anyone actually still doing coal mining. The machinery does the work of 1000s of people. Same thing for farming. The displacements can happen.

Which comes to: "but no serious displacement is happening."

Citation needed. The entirety of the screen-writers guild would seemingly disagree with you based on the longest strike in their history. Given that evidence, I do think it is more plausible that you lack empathy and data for your comments compared to that entire group striking for no reason. Otherwise, can you clarify how you are correct and the entire union representing screen-writers wrong? Why are you are right and 200k other people wrong, about their own industry?

[1] https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/employment/coa...:

It's a pretty complicated topic, but I want to say one thing:

I geniunely hate how the discourse become SO divided, Artists versus Tech person (some people would call it tech bros but I think that's name-calling and have some negative connotation and I don't want that).

Call me sensitive, but this kinda thing is depressing _as heck_.

It's sad as there are _so many_ great artists I follow. And also so many tech experts.

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