"And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity." -William S. Burroughs
AI is simply the assembly line for the digital realm. It takes the trendy products of the rich (custom software, McKinsey PowerPoint decks, etc) and mass produces them in the same style so everyone can afford to buy them at Walmart.
For things where the exclusivity WAS the value (like McKinsey consulting PowerPoints), they may fall out of fashion altogether when everyone can have them. Like performative 17th century aristocrat clothing styles.
I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing hand-loomed fabrics and bespoke clothing and $5,000 cobbler-pounded leather boots while typing angrily on their keyboards.
I also don’t see anyone commissioning artisan chair makers and blacksmiths to create $10,000+ custom furniture to sit on while posting pessimistic comments to HN.
Nobody here seems to want to hire a carriage maker to build a custom $400,000 automobile, they seem to all go for mass produced models, betraying the local artisans.
The hypocrisy is downright silly.
The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans (and ultimately the artisans benefit too given nobody is a true artisan in more than a few things). This ultimately raises living standards for everyone.
Second, machinery that automated work isn't remotely the same. Engineers have built and refined the machines without having to go and inspect every new work that has been created by artisans each time. Creative people who have practiced the art of designing clothes and shoes stitch together and build prototypes. Entire machinery is built as an independent path away from how artisans build furniture.
There is a parallel though for how LLMs, in order to improve, gobble up all new work produced by people and never give attribution back. We see it when someone does a unique physical product design and starts selling it only for some 2 bit shop elsewhere to try and copy and sell a cheap knockoff version. The original person does all the hard work of prototyping and testing and the 2 bit shop which has access to more machinery resources buys a couple, copies it with less quality, makes a few changes, sells it, and probably outspends the original person on ad revenue too.
No, GenAI doesn't produce the exact same work as what they ingest. But style does get reproduced. And style is such a difficult problem to solve. Studio Ghibli didn't craft its signature style by accident. People prototyped and worked hard on how to design it, how to solve the problems unique to the design, created rules for it, and then painstakingly made the stories that were best told through that style. Only for the AI companies to pop out some bastardized version of it every time someone says "make my picture anime". No attribution given. No love. No homage. Just an encouragement for hordes of people to claim how easy it is without ever understanding the thought that actually went into it.
So no. It's not hypocrisy. It's recognition of these machines being information and creative laundering factories. They take and take and never give back any value that they could never create or improve on on their own. Those last words being key
While reading your rebuttal I was able to substitute LLM with loom and arrive at the same conclusions, mourning the loss of the artisan, copying their product for cheaper, etc. So you failed to draw the distinction that is necessary to rebut their point.
The only point you made that seemed on point to me was the first one, "it's not hypocrisy because people do protest looms", which I didn't find convincing.
The courts have already ruled on this. Creative work that is inspired by (ie. an amalgamation of) other works is not a copy. It’s how ALL creative work is generated by humans too. When enough humans get inspired/rip-off something we just legitimize it and call it a "genre."
The truth is most of the work done in the world is duplicative and not novel. LLMs are a giant compression model on that duplicative work, and if your job is to create charts and buttons out of react components for the 7,000,000th time, it turns out it’s better that AI automate that and free you up to focus on higher value tasks for humanity. Just as mass production eliminated duplicative artisanal work that made pretty much everything scarce and only available to the elite.
Did the rich elite lose some of the eccentric uniqueness in their world, and some of their previous performative signaling mechanisms (ie. putting 4 layers of hand carved crown molding in a ceiling differently than the last guy, or using $400k/yr engineers to create slightly different border radius buttons in each app)? Yes, but it comes at the benefit of the global masses who now can attain everything previously only available to elites via the AI mass production.
I loved visiting Versailles. Yet, I would never want to go back and live in that time, because there's a 99.99999% chance you aren't the guy living in it, and instead are the one who has 4 generations of your family enslaved to carve tiny sculptures into hand railings and live off gruel in a freezing cold hut while doing it. My lame, non-artisanal 2000s mass produced home is vastly superior to conditions that 99.99999% of people in the 1600s lived in.
The difference is twofold: firstly people are intrinsically driven to be creative, that even with inspiration taken there's a desire to create something fresh. As you say, not just mechanical regurgitations of pre-revolutionary French style.
Secondly, "the courts have already ruled in this?" Have they? Are we not doing the IP thing anymore? Does that go for you and I and everyone else, or only for a handful of billion dollar companies?
As much as people would like to completely own and charge rents on the idea of "Serif text on a black background with gradients," this is not a good outcome for society and we've already fought this battle and come to a good solution a long time ago. Creativity has flourished and is still flourishing because of it.
Do you think software patent trolls filing lawsuits on protected IP like "Phone application with informational dashboard" are good now because you hate and fear AI so much? Becoming pro-patent troll and pro-DRM would be a wild turn for the HN userbase, but seems to be what you're suggesting.
Could you quote where I'm suggesting that? It seems like you're putting words in my mouth here and it makes discussion feel quite unpalatable.
> There have been a million IP disputes over creative/artistic outputs going back hundreds of years.
Yes and that's why I'm not allowed to torrent thousands of books to learn a particular style of painting or writing or whatever. I'm not allowed to scrape the whole Spotify library to help my music studies. But for these companies it's accepted practice. Odd
This isn't only mass-produced products replacing bespoke products, it's also the strip-mining of attribution.
A better analogy is if we were to abolish trademark protection completely; anyone can go create a Nike knockoff, complete with the branding, and sell them legally.
This is what the blog post under discussion is complaining about - your labour will be laundered through the machine, and presented to an end-user with the end-user having never heard of you.
Isn't that what organizations do in general? A person grows your food and installed the plumbing in your house and wrote a component of the web browser you're using. Do you know their names?
The person growing the food I get or the plumber installing a toilet never asked for attribution because it wasn't relevant to their pay.
> Do you know their names?
As a matter of fact, for things that require attribution, I do know their names. You do too!
Like the author of this blog post - his name is right there on the site.
Now, you may say "But I'm fine with laundering attribution", but that is no different from claiming that trademark law should be effectively nullified because you don't wear trademarked clothing.
But it is though. If they do a good job then you could have customers wanting the same one again. You go to the grocery store and there is just a bin full of undifferentiated produce. Some days they're juicier than others. They came from different farms. But they don't even tell you when they switch from one to another, so how is a farmer who is doing a better job supposed to get more business or command higher prices?
> As a matter of fact, for things that require attribution, I do know their names. You do too!
Blogs include the author's name because they want to, not because they're required to. There are plenty of organizational ones that are published only in the name of the organization.
The thing that allows attribution to happen is the absence of a middle man. When you go to the farm shop at the farm itself then you get told the name of the family whose farm it is, but not when you go to Walmart. When you hire someone to build a walkway you see their face and learn their name; when the government hires them to build a sidewalk on your behalf they become a faceless abstraction.
Is it? Lets see your reason for thinking that.
> If they do a good job then you could have customers wanting the same one again. You go to the grocery store and there is just a bin full of undifferentiated produce. Some days they're juicier than others. They came from different farms. But they don't even tell you when they switch from one to another, so how is a farmer who is doing a better job supposed to get more business or command higher prices?
As far as I can see from the text above, you feel it should be relevant to their pay, but nothing you say makes me think that it currently is relevant to their pay.
What you think should be happening is not my point; I am only saying that it isn't happening.
> Blogs include the author's name because they want to, not because they're required to.
But that's my point! You appear to agree that the labour supplier in this specific case wants attribution, and yet you are arguing that they should not get it?
No, it currently is relevant to their pay. They would be paid a different amount if the quality of their product was attributable by the customer to the specific producer. It affects how many customers/sales they get.
> You appear to agree that the labour supplier in this specific case wants attribution, and yet you are arguing that they should not get it?
But how is that any different than any other case? If the farmer wants attribution, that doesn't mean Walmart is giving it to them.
You are proposing a hypothetical; that is not what is currently happening.
I suppose we have to agree to disagree: I see no evidence of the specific claim of yours that customers have a preference for specific individuals picking fruit (or whatever).
A specific brand? Sure. A specific niche (free-range, whatever), sure. A specific individuals labour? Yeah, I'd need to see some evidence for that!
Not only is it against the rules here, but if I’m so wrong and ignorant, you should be able to dismantle my argument easily!
Yet, you've acknowledged that prior disruptions have been net positive. So I'm struggling to understand your position. You seem to agree.
You, and people like you, make analogies between current trends regarding AI and historical processes related to different inventions that were supposed to act as milestones technological progress, or even progress in general. Problem is that, primo, historical events are unique, and all historiosophical attempts so far were futile, therefore saying that "AI, in terms of social impact, is like the mass production of clothing" is completely ungrounded.
Secundo, there are important qualitative differences that make subjects of these analogies more different than alike.
Tertio, people are usually, you know, ignorant of what were the real, immediate social impacts of past inventions. For example, steam machine is being presented as thing that freed a common person from mundane, hard work, but the actual outcome was quite the opposite.
Quarto, claims like "mass production benefitted 99% of population and raised the living standards for all" are very non-trivial, and ideologically loaded, especially if you consider environmental pollution, health hazards, social atomization, worker alienation, and so on.
You seem to have invented a fanciful storybook idea of how the average person lived before the industrial revolution, and have ignored every single one of the downsides and discounted all of the upsides of the past 200 years.
There's no further argument to be had though, because yours is not a rational position, but one rooted in emotional feelings and personal frustration. You believe a past you never experienced was better. No logical rebuttal I waste time assembling can refute a fantasy world.
Second, you created a strawman just to feel better.
> have ignored every single one of the downside
I didn't. I said your claims are non-trivial, and enumerated some examples of downsides created by past technical revolutions. There were upsides, there were downsides. It was you who have claimed that "99% are better off". I never claimed anything like that, nor anything that could be considered an opposite..
> You believe a past you never experienced was better
Point me to the exact place where I expressed such belief.
> No logical rebuttal I waste time assembling can refute a fantasy world
You couldn't assemble logical rebuttal because the issue at stake is material, not logical. Learn the difference.
I get it, you are a fragile snowflake that cannot bear criticism, but please, don't put words into my comments even though you cannot find them there.
Please stop pretending to be debating many people when you are responding to a single person, otherwise quote specific statements that you think you are responding from "the crowd". No, you should not be surprised when OSS people reevaluate the landscape any time they witness OSS being weaponized against them even though the possibility of that happening is written on "the tin" so to speak. There have been an increasing number of debates around well-known cases a decade or half before the advent of this most recent incarnation of AI. Companies with deeper pockets and larger market access burying a popular OSS product through duplication was a common category.
Do you think these anti-AI folk wouldn't evaluate the situation differently if AI, trained on public data was in fact a public utility, seeing as you are concerned about democratization?
We can’t afford those things…
Before mass production only the aristocrats and royalty could own a closet full of clothing and shoes.
If we blocked the creation of the assembly line and factories, we would return to that state where everyone is basically a subsistence farmer living in the dirt with nothing.
> The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans
And in this case it's looking more like less than 1% benefiting at the expense of 85%?
> I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing ... commissioning ...
I would love to order more bespoke goods but mass production has driven most of the makers out of business and that ones that remain I can't afford. You're saying this as though I actually wanted this ugly IKEA closet.
Your model of the world is wrong. 85% (even 99%) of people do not create any art, software, music, etc.
The vast majority of people are consumers of any given craft, and the 1% of the most passionate in a given field are creators, as has always been the case. It’s the same with people who create websites vs consume them.
> mass production has driven most of the makers out of business and ones that remain I can't afford
Again, your model of the world is wrong.
There was never a time when getting everything made bespoke was cheap. You’re pretending everyone was a rich aristocrat nobleman in the past if you think this is the case.
Historically you just wouldn't have a closet or enough clothing to fill it at all.
Etc.? I think you're overlooking a very broad range of occupations. From people getting into politics by doing newspaper summaries for party offices to people editing newspapers.
And if you're really pushing that it's 99% benefiting while 1% lose out then where do the kids whose schools get bombed or the women harassed with deepfakes fit in? Do they still benefit because they don't have to go to the trouble of writing a song about their pain?
It's the same companies and the same technologies doing all these things.
Let's not even get into the inauguration gifts in the US etc...
> You’re pretending everyone was a rich aristocrat nobleman in the past
I'm not pretending anything and my world model isn't "wrong." I don't mind having this discussion but I would ask you to mind your manners.
> There was never a time when getting everything made bespoke was cheap.
In my lifetime my family had many things made to order; from clothes to furniture. And I grew up in one of the poorest parts of the country, a working class area. But that meant that everyone worked and everyone had trades. My grandfather made me toys from scrap wood at the shipyard, my uncle was a joiner who made us better quality tables than I can get now, another was a plumber who ensured everything ran smoothly in our pipes. My aunts knitted and sewed everything we wanted. When a new fashion came out like skinny jeans they would tighten the ones we had; at Halloween I only had to say what I wanted to dress up as and the costume would appear.
Now if I go to the same area everyone is surviving on state benefits, the skills are all automated away and everyone is sitting in the same gray houses with the same gray furniture. And everyone looks miserable.
But at least no one has to do any expressionist painting to let their emotions out, they can just prompt it now and enjoy more and more consumption.
"Garbage in, garbage out."