These are all real people.
They canonize themselves, and then act all shocked and offended when the rest of the world doesn't share their belief.
Obviously the existence of AI is valuable enough to pay the cost of offsetting a few artists' jobs, it's not even a question to us, but to artists it's shocking and offensive.
You say it's obvious that the existence of AI is valuable to offset a few artists' jobs, but it is far from obvious. The benefits of AI are still unproven (a more hallucinatory google? a tool to help programmers make architectural errors faster? a way to make ads easier to create and sloppier?). The discussion as to whether AI is valuable is common on hackernews even, so I really don't buy the "it's obvious" claim. Furthermore, the idea that it is only offsetting a few artists' jobs is also unproven: the future is uncertain, it may devastate entire industries.
Certainly there are artists with inflated egos and senses of self-importance (many computer programmers with this condition too), but does this give us moral high ground to freely use their work?
How many people is it OK to exploit to create "AI"?
we will never be able to automate anything because the risk:reward ratio simply won't be there if you have to pay off millions/billions of people. progress will grind to a halt but i guess we'll have preserved some archaic jobs while our children are denied a better world
certainly the Industrial Revolution would never have happened with this mindset
> They canonize themselves, and then act all shocked and offended when the rest of the world doesn't share their belief.
You could've written this about software engineers and tech workers.
> Obviously the existence of AI is valuable enough to pay the cost of offsetting a few artists' jobs, it's not even a question to us
No, it's not obvious at all. Current AI models have made it 100x easier to spread disinformation, sow discord, and undermine worker rights. These have more value to me than being able to more efficiently Add Shareholder Value
Instead the cost of pollution is externalised and placed on the backs of humanity's children. That includes the pollution created by those datacentres running off fossil fuel generators because it was cheaper to use gas in the short term than to invest in solar capacity and storage that pays back over the long term. The pollution from building semiconductors in servers and GPUs that will likely have less than a 10 year lifespan in an AI data center as newer generations have lower operating cost. The cost of water being used for evaporative cooling being pulled from aquifers at a rate that is unsustainable because it's cheaper than deploying more expensive heat pumps in a desert climate.... and the pollution of the information on the internet from AI slop.
The short term gains from AI have a real world cost that most of us in the tech industry are isolated from. It is far from clear how to make this sustainable. The sums of money being thrown at AI will change the world forever.
Obviously, the optimal solution is to eliminate all humans and have data centers do everything.