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Comment by johnwheeler | Hacker News Reader

To me this is a no brainer. If it’s a choice between having AI and not,

Even if the knock-on effect is "all the artists and thinkers who contributed to the uncompensated free training set give up and stop creating new stuff"?

If an "artist" or "thinker" stops because of this, I question their motivations and those labels in the first place.

After Instagram started feeding user photos to their AI models, I stopped adding new photos to my profile. I still take photos. I wonder about your thoughts about my motivation.

They might be motivated to pay their bills. Weird people.

Right, people were trying to 'pay their bills' with content that was freely shared such that AI could take advantage of it. Weird people.

Or we're all talking about and envisioning some specific little subset of artists. I suspect you're trying to pretend that someone with a literal set of paintbrushes living in a shitty loft is somehow having their original artwork stolen by AI despite no high resolution photography of it existing on the internet. I'm not falling for that. Be more specific about which artists are losing their livelihoods.

Numerous kinds of artists are feeling the squeeze. Copy writers, stock photographers, graphic designers, UI designers, interior designers, etc.

I guess it's their fault for not being clairvoyant before AI arrived, and for sharing their portfolio with others online to advertise their skills for commissions to pay for food and rent.

Everyone tends to have "be able to afford basic necessities" as a major motivation. That includes people who work in creative fields.

Several of the agricultural revolutions we went though is what freed up humanity to not spend all of it's work producing sustenance, leaving time for other professions like making art and music. But it also destroyed a lot of jobs for people who were necessary for gathering food the old inefficient way.

If we take your argument to it's logical conclusion, all progress is inherently bad, and should be stopped.

I deposit instead that the real problem is that we tied people's ability to afford basic necessities to how much output they can produce as a cog in our societal machine.

> I deposit instead that the real problem is that we tied people's ability to afford basic necessities to how much output they can produce as a cog in our societal machine.

Yes, because if you depend on some overarching organisation or person to give it to you, you are fucked 100% of the time due this dependency.

The net result was positive in that new jobs were created for every farming job lost, as people moved to cities.

If AI replaces millions of jobs, it will be a net negative in job availability for working class people.

I agree with your last point, the way the system is set up is incompatible with the looming future.

The jobs in the cities weren't created by the new farming techniques though, those new farming techniques only removed jobs by the millions like you are saying AI might do.

I didn't say they were created by new farming techniques, I said new jobs in general were created by increased urbanization, which was partially fed by agricultural innovations over time. For example, Jethro Tull's seed drill (1701) enabled sowing seeds in neat rows, which eliminated the jobs of "broadcast seeders" (actual title). If you lost your farming job due to automation, you could move to the city to feed your family.

There is no similar net creation of jobs for society if jobs are eliminated by AI, and it's even worse than that because many of the jobs are specialized, high-skill positions that can't be transferred to other careers easily. It goes without saying that it also includes millions of low-skill jobs like cashiers, stockers, data entry, CS reps, etc. Generally people who are already struggling to get enough hours and feed their families as it is.

For future reference, it's posit, not deposit.

Ah, thank you.

Considering you're not much of an artist or thinker yourself, I'm not sure your questioning has much value.

Recording devices, you know a record player had a profound effect on artists. go back

That seems like a poor comparison.

Recording devices permitted artists to sell more art.

Many of the uses of AI people get most excited about seem to be cutting the expensive human creators out of the equation.

Recording devices destroyed most of the musician's jobs. Vast majority of musicians who were employed before advent of recordings didn't have their own material and were not good enough to make good recordings anyway. Same with artists now: the great ones will be much more productive, but the bottom 80-90% won't have anything to do anymore.

I disagree, with AI the dynamics are very different from recording.

Current AI can greatly elevate what a beginning artist can produce. If you have a decent grasp of proportions, perspective and good ideas, but aren't great at drawing, then using AI can be a huge quality improvement.

On the other hand if you're a top expert that draws quickly and efficiently it's quite possible that AI can't do very much for you in a lot of cases, at least not without a lot of hand tuning like training it on your own work first.

I think it will just emphasise different skills and empower creative fields which use art but are not art per se. If you're a movie director, you can storyboard your ideas easily, and even get some animation clips. If you're an artist with a distinct personal style, you're in a much better position too. And if you're a beginner who is just starting, you can focus on learning these skills instead of technical proficiency.

Indeed. It is definitely going to be a net negative for the very talented drawers and traditional art creators, but it's going to massively open the field and enable and empower people who don't have that luck of the draw with raw talent. People who can appreciate, enjoy, and identify better results will be able to participate in the joy of creation. I do wish there was a way to have the cake and eat it too, but if we're forced to choose between a few Lucky elite being able to participate, and the rest of us relegated to watching, or having the ability to create beauty and express yourself be democratized (by AI) amongst a large group of people, I choose the latter. I fully admit though that I might have a different perspective where I in the smaller, luckier group. I see it as yet another example of the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance. If I didn't know where I was going to be born, I would be much more inclined on the side of wider access.

We didn't need to take people's music to build a record player, and when we printed records, we paid the artists for it.

So yeah it had a profound effect, but we got consent for the parts that fundamentally relied on other people.

The record player eliminated 90% of musicians jobs.

we already have lots of AI. this is about having plagiarization machines or not.

Yeah we got that AI through scraping.

Computers already were plagiarizing machines, not sure what the difference is tbh. The same laws will apply.0

An AI essentially monopolized by one (or even a few) large non-profits is not necessarily beneficial to the rest of us in the grand scheme of things.

Indeed a no brainer. The best possible outcome would be that OpenAI gets sued into oblivion (or shut down for tax fraud) as soon as possible.

So no AI for anybody? I don't see how that's better.

No you can have AI. Just pay a license for people's content if you want to use it in your orphan crushing machine.

It's what everyone else does. The entitlement has to stop.

That's just not feasible and you know it. That just means companies like Google and OpenAI (with billions of dollars from companies like MS and Apple) will monopolize AI. This isn't better for everybody else. It just means we're subject to the whims of these companies.

You're advocating for destroying all AI or ensuring a monopoly by corporations. Whose side are you actually on?

> That's just not feasible and you know it

Irrelevant. The law does not care about feasibility of breaking it.

If I decide to run a hit man business, that's also infeasible. Dealing with the arrests and fines would be too much. The conclusion then is not to bend the law to make murder legal. The conclusion is my business is illegitimate, and it's the civic duty of my Country to make sure it fails.

> Whose side are you actually on?

The people making the content that corps are profiting big off of. They should pay a license.

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