Yeah gulags and other forced work camps also come to mind. But I guess this is a larger scale in terms of man hours
It's hard for me to imagine a profession that should exist in a utopian society. People should just be able to explore and build cool shit. People should have instant access to food when they're hungry and housing when the weather gets bad, and we could live in a society that does all that without having rent extraction baked into everything.
> It's hard for me to imagine a profession that should exist in a utopian society
with
> People should have instant access to food when they're hungry and housing when the weather gets bad
You don't think that farming, baking, and building are professions?
They oppose the "live as equals" part.
Until one person decides we should change something about this utopia, arguments break out, populations schism, and we're back to fighting over finite resources once again.
Utopias and conflict-free societies are pipedreams
Normally this isn't the case for any technology except for the time it first comes around. AI is only different to use for two reasons. First, it is in our time. Second, it seems to be faster than any of the options before, so the shock is harder.
But in general, this is a website of people writing code. How many on here study how a person solves a problem and then trains the ultimate chimpanzee to do (at least part of) their job? Is building computer programs that automate what others did manually theft?
Consider the origin of the word "computer" itself, a mass theft of jobs that would have employed the whole world many many times over.
Going back to the previous example, say I pay a different coworker $50 for the data to train the chimpanzee and then use it to replace the first person. In either case they lost their jobs while receiving nothing for it. In either case, what happened to them is the same, so how would they be stolen from in one case and not in another?
There is broad evidence that labs have used substantial amounts of pirated data, no need to reach for a new definition of theft.
I remember reading literature from the 1930s, and there were quite a few folks who thought that the musicians-doing-recordings were stealing from the old-timers who played for live audiences.
History does not exactly repeat itself, but it rhymes
Well, sure, there's no one left to fight once everyone already lost their job and moved to another career. But, that's sort of a "might makes right" resolution. The workers don't have the political sway needed to get the government to intervene.
Businesses succeed in getting that sort of market intervention all the time. Most of the modern changes to copyright law are driven by business lobbying.
You'd rather people still did old, obsolete jobs?
As it is, in this case.
I can use 6 seconds of a movie in a clip as fair use so I cut an entire movie up into 6 second clips and play them all one after another for you.
I’m not sure why people think they understand IP law better than the courts just because they don’t like the answer
https://admin.bakerlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/ECF-23...
> For the print library copies that Anthropic purchased and then converted into digital library copies, Anthropic already enjoyed entitlement to keep the copies in its library. The purpose of the copying was to keep them in its library but with more favorable storage and searchability properties. Copying the entire work was exactly what this purpose required. There was no surplus copying. The source copy was destroyed.
> The third fair use factor favors fair use for the purchased library copies converted from print to digital.
...
> This order grants summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use was a fair use. And, it grants that the print-to-digital format change was a fair use for a different reason. But it denies summary judgment for Anthropic that the pirated library copies must be treated as training copies.
Because judges are human beings and can be catastrophically wrong; e.g., see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford