drooby

No, this is a totally fair response. That was probably the core error in my argument.

Some people, perhaps most, will enjoy AI art. Artists are at risk of displacement too.

But a subset of art appreciators hold firm that the creator is an essential aspect of the work, and I don’t see that conviction fading.

How large this subset is, I don’t know. But they also happen to be the world’s tastemakers and trendsetters. Their beliefs largely shape our aesthetic world, so their influence may only grow.

There is a class of human output that will retain value regardless of AI capability: art and sport. People care about the creator. The source defines the work, the awe, and the emotional response.

But almost all output outside that space is at risk of AI displacement. Corporations are amoral entities that optimize for profit, and they follow the law only as much as they must.

The law is our collective action. We socially construct what we value. We could fight to preserve the 5-day work week doing what machines can do. But.. I’d rather fight for collective ownership of the machines.

I can't tell if this is satire

"Augustine of Hippo was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, and his authority in theological matters was universally accepted in the Latin Middle Ages and remained, in the Western Christian tradition, virtually uncontested till the nineteenth century."

.....

"...he nevertheless remained convinced that soul is an incorporeal and immortal substance that can, in principle, exist independently of a body"

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/#AnthGodSoulSou...

At what point will we create micro tolls that AI must pay?

Foucault is taken seriously because his ideas are politically empowering

I think we’re agreeing. The point of the sleep parallel is exactly that the content doesn’t matter, and it’s the filtering process that does the work. Brains replay noisy, sometimes incoherent patterns during sleep and the value is in how that replay reshapes connection weights, not in whether the replay is accurate. That’s the same principle you’re describing with the steering signal

I.e sleep replays don’t need to replay Tuesday’s meeting accurately. They just need to activate the relevant pathways so that the strong ones fire and the weak ones don’t. The pattern of what fires versus what doesn’t is the signal. The “content” of the dream is basically irrelevant.

Fascinating...

This feels eerily similar to sleep consolidation or synaptic pruning

GraphRAG is for LLMS... markdown is for humans.. humans that exist in the meantime

A leading theory in neuroscience is that human brains are fundamentally prediction machines too, constantly predicting sensory input, other people’s behavior, the next word in a sentence. “it’s just prediction” isn’t the gotcha you think it is. Prediction and attention turn out to be a surprisingly powerful foundation for intelligence.

The “just a text predictor” framing was fair a couple years ago but hasn’t kept up. Current models can genuinely identify untested edge cases even when coverage is 100%. You're definitely using the latest and greatest models?

The architecture started as next-token prediction, sure, and yes, human judgment is still required, but that judgment is being captured and integrated too. Every time millions of people use these models, their feedback feeds the next round of improvements.

Also, these models don’t need to replace your best engineers to be disruptive. They just need to outcompete the bottom of the bell curve. For a lot of junior-level work, we’re already getting close.

This is a great point. The Netherlands is the cautionary tale of what happens when you don't do what Alaska and Norway did. A massive resource boom without proper public management hollowed out the rest of the economy.

If a handful of companies capture most of the value from AI while it simultaneously displaces workers across every other sector, that's Dutch disease applied to the entire knowledge economy. One sector booms, everything else withers.

Nobody is proposing that AI companies track down individual contributors and pay them based on their specific contribution. That's not how any of this works.

The Alaska Permanent Fund doesn't pay Alaskans based on how much oil was under their particular backyard. It pays a dividend from a public fund because the resource is collectively owned. The mechanism is simple: companies extract a public resource, a percentage goes into a fund, the fund pays out to the public.

And the infrastructure comparison doesn't quite work. The people who built computing hardware and internet infrastructure were paid for that work at market rates by the companies that hired them. The billions of people whose writing, code, images, and knowledge trained these models weren't paid anything for that specific use. That gap is the whole point.

Addition:

Also worth knowing: collective intellectual property already exists. ASCAP and BMI have been doing exactly this for decades. Individual songwriters can't enforce their rights every time their music gets played, so they pool their IP, license it collectively, and distribute the revenue. The problem they solved is almost identical to the training data problem. Each individual contribution is tiny, but the collective value is enormous. Applying this at the scale of the general public would be novel, but the underlying mechanism isn't. The concept works. It just hasn't been applied to training data yet.

That's not snarky at all, that's exactly the point. They did get it both ways.

The comment I was responding to argued that ownership of non-physical things is basically a "polite lie" and that information is just entropy that belongs to whoever can capture it. My point was that the AI companies clearly don't believe that when it applies to them. They patent their architectures, copyright their outputs, sue competitors for IP violations, and lock down their model weights. They fully believe in ownership of non-physical things.

But when it comes to the billions of people whose work they trained on? Suddenly information is free-flowing entropy that belongs to no one.

That's the asymmetry at the heart of this. The rules around IP apparently apply when it protects their profits, but not when it would obligate them to share those profits with the people whose work made them possible. Which is exactly why the public needs to assert a claim now, before that asymmetry gets any more entrenched.

Well, two things worth considering.

First, training isn't a one-time event. These companies are continuously scraping new data, training new model generations, ingesting new human output. Every new model is a new extraction event. The fact that GPT-4 already trained on your 2022 blog post doesn't mean the window is closed. GPT-6 will train on your 2025 and 2026 output too. There's always a live point at which to assert a collective claim.

Likely - these models will always be training on us to better understand us and continue to be of value to us commercially.

Second, "anyone could redo it with the right resources" is technically true but practically meaningless. Anyone could theoretically drill for oil too. The barrier was never access to the crude sitting in the ground. It was the billions in infrastructure needed to extract and refine it. Same here. The data is public, but the compute required to turn it into a frontier model costs billions. That concentration of capital is exactly why a public claim on the value makes sense, just like it did with oil.

No offense, but this comment makes virtually zero contact with reality.

Our entire civilization runs on your "polite lie" of owning non-physical things. Patents, copyrights, trade secrets, licensing agreements, NDAs. Trillion dollar companies are built on the legal enforceability of intellectual property. The software you're using to type this comment exists because someone owns the code.

Calling information "entropy" doesn't make contract law disappear. We decided collectively that people and institutions can own ideas, and we built the modern economy on that decision. You can argue that's a fiction, but it's a fiction that everything around you depends on.

You can't invoke "universal laws of information" to dismiss public claims to training data while the companies training on it aggressively enforce their own IP. They patent their architectures. They copyright their outputs. They sue competitors for misuse. They clearly believe in ownership of non-physical objects when it benefits them.

You don't get it both ways.

Alaska and Norway aren't communist. They're capitalist economies with thriving private sectors. Oil companies still operate, still profit, still compete. The public just gets a share of the value extracted from a collectively owned resource.

The Alaska Permanent Fund has been running since 1982 inside the most conservative state in America. Norway's sovereign wealth fund is the largest on earth and their economy is doing fine.

These models work.. work well... And they exist comfortably within mixed market economies.

The question is whether the public gets a cut when private companies build fortunes on a collectively generated resource, or whether they don't. We already know the answer can be yes without anything breaking.

Our entire white collar system might be a house of cards with AI, what I am proposing is a safe hedge against a future with potentially massive wealth inequality, and increased unemployment. But this isn't just about protection from injury... people should BENEFIT massively.

I never said AI companies are evil or that $20/mo access is bad. You're arguing against a position I don't hold.

AI can be genuinely useful AND the people whose collective output made it possible can deserve a share of the wealth it generates. These aren't in conflict.

Alaskans benefit from oil too. It heats their homes, paves their roads, funds their schools. That wasn't an argument against the dividend. "You're already benefiting from the resource" has never been a reason the people who generated it shouldn't share in the profits.

The question was never "is AI good." It's "when something built on collective human output generates trillions, does the public have a claim to a share." Nothing you said here addresses that.

Fair point, data isn't scarce like oil. Nobody's losing their forum posts. That part of my analogy is weak.

But you're answering a question I'm not asking. The question isn't "was something taken from you." It's "who deserves a share when collective human output generates trillions in commercial value."

your torrenting analogy makes my case. Nobody loses their original movie when it gets pirated either. We still recognize that the people who made it deserve compensation when others profit from it. The entire IP enforcement apparatus is built on exactly that principle.

Non-rivalrous doesn't mean non-exploitable.

A tax takes a percentage of value that someone else created. A royalty collects payment for access to something you already own. When Alaska collects from oil companies, it's not taxing their profits. It's charging them for extracting a resource that belongs to the people of Alaska. The oil was never theirs.

It being a royalty and not a tax is the reason Alaska's dividend is politically untouchable while tax-funded programs get gutted every budget cycle. Ownership is a fundamentally stronger claim than redistribution.

The same way Alaska taxes oil extraction. Alaska doesn't track which molecule of oil came from which acre. They don't audit every drop. They tax the extraction operation and collect royalties on the resource being pulled out of the ground. We know who is training large models. We know roughly what data they're using. We know their revenue. A compute tax on large training runs, a revenue royalty on foundation model companies, or a licensing fee above a certain data threshold... none of these require tracking individual data points. They require taxing the extraction operation, which is visible, measurable, and already being monitored to some degree for safety purposes. We already have a very analogous model in the form of oil and Alaska.

Edit: to clarify, this wouldn't be a tax. A tax is the government taking a cut of someone else's money. A royalty is the owner charging for access to their resource. Alaska doesn't tax Exxon for drilling. It charges Exxon for extracting something that belongs to the people. Same principle here.

if you assert ownership over physical infrastructure, the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space.

But the model is built on us. You can move the server anywhere you want. You can’t escape the fact that everything inside it came from human minds. That’s an ownership claim no one can relocate away from.

The training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense commercial value. Every book written, every forum post answered, every photo shared, every line of code contributed... billions of people built the knowledge base that makes these models work. Without that collective human output, AI is nothing.

Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction."

We are in exactly that window right now with AI. The resource is being extracted at an incredible pace and almost all the value is flowing to a handful of companies. The longer people wait to assert sovereign ownership over the collective intelligence that makes AI possible, the harder it becomes.

If you think this is crazy, ask yourself what’s actually crazier: demanding a share of the value built on your collective labor, or watching trillions of dollars get extracted from it and saying nothing.

the idea of Alaskans getting a check just for existing sounded crazy too, right up until it didn’t.

I'm currently in the hiring process.. and my head is spinning.. 1. Interviewing is becoming more difficult. Many skills we valued two years ago are genuinely becoming less valuable. 2. The skills we tested 2 years ago were in-part a proxy for evaluating critical think and systems thinking skills. So we need to re-evaluate our technical interview process. 3. It's genuinely less friction for me to prompt Claude than some of my SEII colleagues. And wtf - Claude is getting so good that it's starting to feel like it's outpacing the intellectual competency of some people. Sure - it does weird things like add Sleep instead of proper concurrency. SEIIs did that too, and we couldn't as easily reprogram them with Skill.md 4. Core competencies remain necessary. Systems thinking. SOLID principles. Communication skills. These skills are more important than ever. 5. Companies that offshored engineers and traded core competency for perceived-throughput are doing the same calculus with Claude. 6. Core business models are threatened. There is fear that revenue streams will dry up. How does one hedge against that risk? Humans are expensive. 7. Navigating this situation is hard and uncertain

I just vibe coded a my own NaturalReader replacement. The subscription was $110/year... and I just canceled it.

Chatterbox TTS (from Resemble AI) does the voice generation, WhisperX gives word-level timestamps so you can click any word to jump, and FastAPI ties it all together with SSE streaming so audio starts playing before the whole thing is done generating.

There's a ~5s buffer up front while the first chunk generates, but after that each chunk streams in faster than realtime. So playback rarely stalls.

It took about 4 hours today... wild.

Same. Claude nailed both questions, with the slightest hint of "... u serious?"

I pay for the $100 Opus 4.6 plan... maybe that makes a difference?

Exactly this.

I’m starting to believe that people who think AI-generated code is garbage actually don’t know how to code.

I hit about 10 years of coding experience right before AI hit the scene, which I guess makes me lucky. I know, with high confidence, what I want my code to look like, and I make the AI do it. And it does it damn well and damn fast.

I think I sit at a unique point for leveraging AI best. Too junior and you create “working monsters.” Meanwhile, Engineering Managers and Directors treat it like humans, but it’s not AGI yet.

While I whole heartedly agree with your conclusion..

It's worth noting that much of the frustration stems from expectations.

I don't expect an AI to learn and "update their weights"..

I do however expect colleagues to learn at a specific rate. A rate that I a believe should meet or exceed my company's standards for, uh, human intelligence.

Special treatment for big players.

I have seen full blown porn on instagram too. Ads. Porn ads. They look exactly like porn ads on porn websites.

It's been about a decade years since many thought full-self-driving cars were "just a couple years away".

Reality is that FSD was/is a "few decades away"

Same for programming. We can take our hands off the steering wheel for longer stretches of time, this is true, but if you have production apps with real users that spend real money then going to sleep at the wheel is far too risky.

Programmers will become the guardians and sentinels of the codebase, and their programming knowledge and debugging skills will still be necessary when the AI corners itself into thorny situations, or is unable to properly test the product.

The profession is changing, no doubt about it. But its obsolescence is probably decades away.