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> Tech folks love sentiments like this because it entirely emotionally places the onus on the people getting ripped off by big tech companies for being ripped off.

This, times a million. Add to that the ancient quote from Plato(?) criticizing writing or the other ancient quote complaining about the irresponsibility of the youth, unthinkingly deployed to attempt to delegitimize any kind of critique of nearly anything.

The technology industry seems to be overflowing with so-called "rational" people who mainly seem to use use whatever intelligence they have to rationalize away responsibility for whatever problems their beloved technology has caused. It's a really stupid and obnoxious pattern; and once you see it, it's hard to not see if everywhere and be annoyed.

I think one element of it is naked greed (especially from the entrepreneurs) but I think another big part is a kind of stuntedness and parochialism that's often fueled by overconfidence (because of success in software engineering, forming an identify around "being smart" etc).

It's one of the reasons I left tech altogether after decades. It's like most people in the tech business right now think their totally unique supreme intellectual might gives them enough pan-subject-matter expertise. The further I moved away from development within the business, the more it repelled me.

> > the people getting ripped off

Nobody is getting "ripped off" by ML models any more than by other humans. When a human wants to launch a high-quality podcast, they survey the market, listen to a lot of other high quality podcasts, and then set to creating their own derivative work.

What ML models are doing is really no different. It's just much, much faster.

Everything humans create is derivative of other works. Speed is the only difference.

The only difference between cracking a 4-bit private key and a 512-bit private key is speed, too. So are private keys of those sizes qualitatively the same thing?

Or is it that, at some nebulous point, a difference in speed between two things impacts the way humans choose to direct their efforts to such a great extent that, for all intents and purposes, the two things are qualitatively different?

> The only difference between cracking a 4-bit private key and a 512-bit private key is speed, too. So are private keys of those sizes qualitatively the same thing?

That's like sayin "The only difference between drinking 1 gallon of water and 100 gallons of water is death." Yes, the quantity of something for a given use-case is bound to give different results.

What the parent comment was commenting is that the actions being taken by these models should not be morally classified as wrong in abundance just as humans following the same process would never be regardless of the output they produced.

I disagree about what the parent is trying to claim.

>What ML models are doing is really no different. It's just much, much faster.

I take this argument to be that (a) what the ML models are doing is fundamentally the same as what humans already do (I agree with this part), (b) that we have no moral problem with humans doing this already (I agree again), and that (c) the fact that AI does it much faster is not sufficient to cause any moral difference (I disagree with this part, and gave a counterexample to show how, in general, a difference in speed can make a moral difference, because that speed difference can have a large impact on how other people decide to behave).

> Commercial creative workers are vulnerable because there's a billions-of-dollars industry effort to copy their professional output and compete with them selling cheap knock-offs.

I agree there will be winners and losers of some proportion here. But I also think the people that want to pay for art will continue to pay as their motives and values are different. There's plenty of cheap knock-off art, but people still pay premiums for art to support the artist and their work.

As someone else replied to you, it's similar to piracy. The people that pirate were never going to pay in the first place. To tie it back here, the people listening to AI generated <whatever> were never going to pay in the first place - which is why so many podcasts get their money from ads.

> The people that pirate were never going to pay in the first place.

I think I agree with your larger point, but is this part true? When Spotify provided a much simpler UX to get the goods, people were happy to pay $10/month and Napster et al basically died.

That's a good point, my statement isn't so black and white as after all.

> But I also think the people that want to pay for art will continue to pay as their motives and values are different.

The big difference is the type of artist. People selling fine art won't be affected much. The vast majority of artists are commercial artists, the the idea that being a commercial artist is morally or creatively bankrupt— a common sentiment among those who want to imagine that this is all just fine— is nonsense. It's pilfered commercial artwork that makes up the bulk of these tools commercial utility, and the people that made it stand to suffer the most.

I haven't seen that idea (artists being morally bankrupt), like you I'd strongly disagree. I also agree it's a shitty situation that artists invested hundreds of hours of their own time to create something only to be repackaged and sold by some AI tool.

That said, I'd still make the same point that people who value art and the artist will buy from and support the artist. Those that don't value it, won't. But now we're on a larger scale.

>That said, I'd still make the same point that people who value art and the artist will buy from and support the artist.

The chances anyone will come across the artist when their marketplace is flooded with increasingly plausible simulacra become more and more slim as time goes on.

AI is choking off any hope for artists supported by patronage, simply by virtue of discoverability being lost and trust being eroded.

>But now we're on a larger scale.

It's simply a bad problem, made worse!

When I was younger, piracy was justified with similar tech folks arguments: "Information wants to be free", "Serves them right for controlling their content in a way that inconveniences me", "If I own a copy, the content is mine to share".

And I used to be right there with them until I realized it was entirely an entirely self-serving way to justify not paying for shit. (I'm not saying it is for everybody, or that everybody's situation mimics mine-- but I was honest enough to admit that's what it was it was for me.) I don't like Adobe's subscription plan, but I was f-ing poor for my younger decades and there's no way in hell I could afford paying a month's rent for photoshop, but $10/mo? I signed up immediately. Also, rather than just using BT whenever I felt like getting an album, I started making deliberate decisions about what albums I wanted and bought them on iTunes when I learned about it in the mid-aughts. Sure the lock-in and DRM suck, but I was happy to pay for the convenience. For indie bands, I still will buy their stuff on Bandcamp even if I can stream it just because they add value to my life and not being legally compelled to pay them isn't the same as not being morally obligated to compensate people whose labor you voluntarily benefit from. I haven't pirated software in decades. If it's not FOSS and I want it, I'll buy it. It's absolutely bananas how many developers make a fat living off of making commercial software but pretend to be radical class warriors when its time to bust out the credit card for anything that isn't physical.

I'm confused about your point RE: infomercials et al - that's poor quality "content" that's been proliferating for, as you say, more than 50 years.

Is that not the work of commercial creative workers? Did it not exist pre AI? There's an argument to scale, certainly, but the idea that "things were better in the past before these <<new technologies>> came out" is generally a suspect argument.

To your broader point - new tools for creating creative work come out all the time. Did we suffer greatly at the loss of image compositors when Photoshop arrived? On the flip side, did digital art gut painting and sculpture? Isn't this just another tool for creative expression?

Art is a way of seeing, not a way of creating. I don't think the technology is taking that away.

>Is that not the work of commercial creative workers? Did it not exist pre AI? There's an argument to scale, certainly, but the idea that "things were better in the past before these <<new technologies>> came out" is generally a suspect argument.

The fact that all of that stuff was crap is central to my point. You might just need to give it another read.

> Art is a way of seeing, not a way of creating. I don't think the technology is taking that away.

I'm really sick and tired of the tech industry's bumper-sticker-level-reductive pseudo-philosophical generalizations about "what art is," what it means to be an artist, the acceptable ways to be an artist, and all of that. Art is a whole fucking lot of things, and chief among them in this context is a class of professions. Glib decrees based on a razor-thin slice of one of the broadest topics in the human experience that conveniently exclude or dismiss the stakes of those with the loudest criticism and the most to lose is obviously self-serving. If you're going to take the libertarian "well that's the market for ya" stance," at least be honest about it. If you're going to try to carefully define the entire universe of ideas and practices that comprise art to conveniently exclude the concerns of the people getting screwed over because you think the optics are better or you feel less icky about it, well you better expect to get some really pissed off responses from them.

There's no glib decree - a new technology has arrived. I'm being very honest about it - you can't put it back in the bottle, any more than you could put jacquard looms or machine woodcarving of trim could be. The position between art and craft can be endlessly debated and I put my stake in the ground.

You can disagree! Folks who are impacted have every right to be pissed, organize, take action. All of these creative endeavors existed _post technology updates_ though - that's my entire point. The need for art doesn't disappear - it changes. Standing athwart the change is a choice, but I'm not sure it is an effective position.

Well gosh, good thing someone in big tech gave me permission to be mad about many in my field being screwed by big tech! Too bad that won't help pay for my cancer treatment because there's no way in hell they'll push out a cure soon enough when they're dumping billions of dollars into figuring out how to sell other people's artwork. At least people won't have to waste an uncomfortable few minutes writing a thoughtful note to my wife in the aftermath when they can just "Ok, google" it.

>> Art is a way of seeing, not a way of creating.

> There's no glib decree

This is a glib decree and it completely ignores most of what art actually is in our world, rather than the quaint little box that most people in the NN business try to stuff it into. Your patronizing tone doesn't lend any authority or add depth to your initial analysis, which you essentially just restated using more words. The "art vs craft" dichotomy doesn't even approach the depth and complexity of the interplay of art and commerce in the worlds like video game development, music, cinema and television, and writing... hell even advertising. Like most tech dudes that assume their incredible mental might gives them some kind of pan-topic expertise allowing them to casually dismiss subject matter experts in other fields based on a few a priori thought exercises, you simply don't know how much more you need to learn to make informed decisions about this topic.

Have you never in your life enjoyed a pirated movie, game, book or music track?

Sure, and it wasn't the right thing to do, especially if it was from an independent artist. I haven't in well over a decade. There's also a canyon of a difference between that, and if I had re-sold their product, at scale, effectively putting the artists out of business. I'd love to explode copyright, but unfortunately, our society has no mechanism for compensating the people that make this valuable work without it, because a whole bunch of tech execs will say "jeez — i'd really like to get paid for their work instead of them."

> There's also a canyon of a difference between that... effectively putting the artists out of business.

There is a direct line between music piracy you did in the past and the status quo of Spotify paying millidollars to artists today. Another POV is, find me musicians who prefer a world with Internet piracy compared to one without.

You're arguing about something I'm not. I completely agree that what I did was wrong, and to boot, I stopped pirating music as soon as online music stores like itunes popped up despite being an impoverished line cook.

That has absolutely no impact, at all, on my fitness to criticize this current wrong.