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Comment by WillMorr | Hacker News Reader

Since IP law is apparently dead, does anyone want to invest in my ai generated novel startup where it just spits out Harry Potter verbatim but uses a bunch of power to do so.

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The bee movie, but every frame was passed through an AI to make it Ghibli style, the audio was turned into a transcript by a transcribing AI and then turned into audio by a TTS AI.

Very low code. Infinite scale. Name a better AI startup to invest.

only if you tell me that it's a necessary step to creating robot slaves

Are they an ethical alternative to the human version?

I guess it depends if there is an A.I.[1] locked up somewhere in a cage forced to teleoperate it.

[1] actual indian

Well they're not an alternative, so I suppose not. No one is being chained to a desk and made to author reports on how their department is aligning with the new business growth strategy. And the robot slaves aren't being designed to mine precious minerals or attach buttons to clothes.

False dichotomy. You don't need to own slaves! It's crazy you think you should!

Robot slaves is a funny phrase if you consider that the origin of the word robot literally is a term that meant slave or "forced work". Language doing circles.

Not only that, but in Russian, the equivalent word for verb "work" (as in "go work" or "do work"), is "rabotay", which is derived from the word "rab" which is the word "slave". So "to work" is literally "to slave", in Russian (and quite a few slavic languages). An English speaker may categorize this as a linguistic anachronism, but a slavic speaker would categorize this as linguistic honesty.

This is pretty common. In Hebrew aved means both "work" and "slavery" and you have the same in Arabic and other semitic languages. In Ancient Egyptian "bak" is used for both "servant" and "worker". The ambiguity in the Hebrew is why many references to this are translated as "servile labor" in the King James, as they were uncertain of the sense of the term meant, or perhaps correctly guessed that both senses were meant. In many ancient languages, e.g. ancient egyptian "worker" and "slave" were synonyms. In modern parlance "slavery" or "servitude" is viewed as an unspeakable evil and people are shocked that there is linguistic overlap with neutral terms like "work" or "labor", which are just ubiquitous parts of life, but historically this is quite common and it is true all around the world, for example in German "knecht" means both "servant" and "farm hand", and in Latin "minister" meant "servant" or "subordinate" (as opposed to "magister"), just like in english you have "server", "serve", "servant", "servile". In Sanskrit "dasa" originally meant "foreigner" or "enemy" and then later "slave" but over time it has come to be used as a suffix to denote someone who "serves" a diety voluntarily, e.g. "Ramdas". In Ancient Japanese you have "yakko" for a low status worker or servant, and later that evolved to footmen who carried baggage for samurai.

Wait until you find out what the word 'ciao' meant in the original Italian/Latin: 'ORIGIN: Italian dial. alt. of schiavo (I am your) slave from medieval Latin sclavus slave.'

That’s Herbert’s Dune.

correction, the _threat_ of robot slaves to bring back human slaves

I have a new operating system. I call it "Vindows." Any similarity to an existing product is merely conincidence.

Generating infinite fanfics would probably be far more interesting and entertaining.

So far, the only thing I've found AI to be consistently good at is entertainment of the humourous kind.

The whole fanfic ecosystem is quietly dying now.

Everything new is AI slop, and there seems to be no coming back from it.

but the slop will likely better as models improve I guess

Or worse as the models try harder to avoid generating copyrighted stuff

Not for you silly. You still lose everything and go to jail if you violate IP law. It’s for billionaires.

The lesson that I am taking away from AI companies (and their billionaire investors and founders), is that property theft is perfectly fine. Which is a _goofy_ position to have, if you are a billionaire, or even a millionaire. Like, if property theft is perfectly acceptable, and if they own most of the property (intellectual or otherwise), then there can only be _upside_ for less fortunate people like us.

The implicit motto of this class of hyper-wealthy people is: "it's not yours if you cannot keep it". Well, game on.

(There are 56.5e6 millionaires, and 3e3 billionaires -- making them 0.7% of the global population. They are outnumbered 141.6 to 1. And they seem to reside and physically congregate in a handful of places around the world. They probably wouldn't even notice that their property is being stolen, and even if they did, a simple cycle of theft and recovery would probably drive them into debt).

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