Real harm #2 is literally the Luddite argument. Of course, we never actually heard the Luddite argument, because 17th century Parliament[0] responded to the Lu

Real harm #2 is literally the Luddite argument. Of course, we never actually heard the Luddite argument, because 17th century Parliament[0] responded to the Luddites with reprisals, censorship, cruel and unusual punishment, and most importantly, propaganda. When you heard the word "Luddite" you probably thought I was accusing AI Snake Oil of being anti-technology. The reality is that the Luddites just wanted looms for themselves, because there were already structured phase-in periods for looms to ensure that skilled weavers got to buy them first. Smashing looms was a tactic to get business owners back to the table, and the business owners responded by propagandizing them as angry technophobes standing in the way of progress so that everyone would have to pay more for clothes. Oh, and also by smashing heads. > One way to do right by artists would be to tax AI companies and use it to increase funding for the arts. This is not a bad idea, if you want to live in a world where everyone has fair access to generative art models but we don't decide to turn human artists into 17th century weavers[1]. However, I don't think this proposal would go down well with artists. Remember when the EFF suggested that, instead of the RIAA suing individual pirates, we should just have a private copying levy on all Internet service to remunerate artists? Yeah, no, that was never going to happen. The reason why this was considered a non-starter is simple: copyright isn't a means to move money from readers to writers' pockets in aggregate, but individually. Nobody wants to be paid out of a pot, and that's why you also see a lot of outrage from artists over Spotify, because it's an effective revenue cap that screws over midlist artists. AI copying levies would further obfuscate attribution, because there currently isn't a way to determine how much value a particular training example provided to a particular generation prompt. And artistic endeavors vary greatly in terms of both quality and, especially, market value. An AI copying levy would flatten this down to just "whoever has the most art in the system wins". In other words, artists are currently playing Monopoly, and you're suggesting they play Ludo[2] instead. [0] An institution largely consisting of rich nobility fighting a cold civil war against the English crown [1] The average /r/stablediffusion commenter would disagree. [2] US readers: Sorry / Trouble. I don't know how the same game got renamed twice to two different things.