Hopefully the spread of AI will make more people realise that everything is a derivative work. If it wasn't an AI, it was a human standing on the shoulders of giants.
[As a side note, the problem with LLMs (sorry, the term "AI" became so muddy I prefer not to use it) is that they tend to be extremely uncreative and just average to mean. So I wouldn't expect added value in creativity itself, just helping humans with more menial tasks just like antirez is doing.]
One unfortunate side-effect is the junior engineers who cannot immediately exceed the AI are not being hired as often. But this era echos the dotcom boom, where very low-skilled people commanded very-high wages. Universities, which have always been white collar job training but pretended they weren't, are being impacted greatly.
https://registrar.mit.edu/stats-reports/majors-count
24% of undergraduate MIT students this year have Computer Science in the title (I asked chatgpt to calculate this from the difficult-to-parse website). 1/4 of all MIT undergraduates are not being trained to be future PhD researchers - they, like all other schools, are training the vast majority of their students for private sector workforce jobs.
The culling is happening all over. We will likely go down to < 1000 colleges in America from 4000 now over the next 15 years.
This is a good thing. The cost of university degrees is far too high. We are in the midst of a vast transition. College should return to being the purview of the truly intelligent and the children of the rich, as it was for all time before WW2. This very weird experiment in human history is ending, and it cannot happen soon enough
You're likely correct that we're witnessing a reconsolidation of wealth and the extinction of the middle class in society, but you seem happy about this? Be careful what you wish for...
https://www.sps.nyu.edu/explore/degrees-and-programs/bs-in-h...
Please, tell me how going $300k in debt for an undergraduate degree in Tourism Studies benefits society, or the student
Sure people can learn hotel management outside of university. But outside of nepotism who will trust random strangers with no qualifications to get their foot in the door?
And you make it sound like socializing the cost of improving outcomes for the next generations as a negative. What is the point if society if not that? Even from a purely selfish perspective, The next generation will take care of me when I am too old to do it myself. I’d want them to be in a good state by then
Do you think you got to wherever you are now without some part of socialized cost of society getting you there?
You have missed my point entirely. These degrees have no value. I would argue they have negative value when factoring in their cost in resources and wasted time
My concern now is a large number of under-employed college graduates who are indebted to worthless degrees, feeling pinched because the debt far surpasses their market value. This has been the case for a long time, but has now reached the upper-echelons of academia where even Ivy league grads cannot get employment. You need to re-calibrate your ire to the correct target
I hope that new societal avenues are created to help young people start their careers, even if those careers are in fields like plumbing, nursing and hospitality. I also hope efforts are made to help white collar workers transition into other (lesser-paying) careers when AI really starts to permanently reduce the size of the white-collar workforce.
Who do you think is the correct target? Big institutions? The college system?
Some of us value education for its own sake, not as a prerequisite for employment.
(Also ignoring the thousand first years at the end of the list.)
The various 0.5 half-student quantities throw some doubt on the measurement too.
Yeah, the world was a better place when it was mostly white males having that chance.
/s
Instead, I feel like the objections are (rightly) these two issues:
1. GenAI operates at a much larger scale than an individual artist. I don't think artists would have an issue with someone commissioning a portrait say in the style Van Gogh (copyright argument). They would have an issue if that artist painted 100,000 pictures a day in the style of Van Gogh.
2. Lack of giving back: some of the greatest artists have internalized great art from previous generations, and then something miraculous happens. An entirely new style emerges. They have now given back to the community that incubated them. I don't really see this same giving back with GenAI.
Edit: one other thought. Adobe used their own legally created art to train their model, and people still complain about it, so I don't buy the copyright argument if they're upset about Adobe's GenAI.
Edit 2: I'm not condoning blatant copyright infringement like is detailed in this post.
2. LLMs will give back what you put in + what they learned, it's your job to put in the original parts. But every so often this interaction will spark some new ideas. The LLM+human team can get where neither of them would get alone, building on each other's ideas.
I don't think that computer systems of any kind should have the same right to fair use that humans have
I think humans should get fair use carve outs for fanart and derivative work, but AI should not
I disagree. There is a ton of free AI generated text, code, images, and video available for completely free for people to learn from.
I’m not a big fan of the copyright system we have myself, but there’s a reason it exists. AI companies illegally training their AI on copyrighted content to reap the spoils of the hard work of other people that never get recognition for their work is the opposite of „giving back“.
If you really think all they do is observe, form a gradient from millions of samples and spit out some approximations, you are deeply mistaken.
You cannot equate human learning with how genai learns (and if it did, we'd have agi already imao)
I welcome AI to copy my crap if that's going to help anyone in the future.
There are like a dozen organizations globally creating anything close to state of the art models. The fact that you can use some for free on your own hardware doesn’t change that those weights were trained by a small cohort of people, with training data selected by those people, and fine-tuning and “alignment” created by those people.
Sure you can fine-tune the smaller ones yourself, but that still leaves you at the will of original creator.
There is open source training and inference software. And there are open weights.
Those things are not enough to reproduce the training.
Even if you had the hardware, you would not be able to recreate llama (for example) because you don't know what data went into the training.
That's a very weird library. You can get their summaries, but you don't have access to the original works used when creating it. Sounds terrible, open source or not.