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Which is why we should be very careful when we consider creating a system that is going to funnel money to people who are already famous for writing, art, etc.

by JieJie 3y ago

Which is why we should be very careful when we consider creating a system that is going to funnel money to people who are already famous for writing, art, etc. How will new artists and writers get their works included in future AI — and then get people to prompt for them — so they can get their paycheck? Even spending a few minutes on this problem would lead to a realization that even if we could create a system that could a) determine rights to any particular portion of an AI-generated work, and b) extract payment and remunerate the artist; would essentially be building a moat around the next generation's intellectual property powerhouses. Generative AI is a revolutionary technology, and we need a revolution in compensation models for arts and letters to go with it.

manuelmoreale 3y ago
Do you believe it can happen? The revolution in compensation. Because as much as I’d love to see it happen, I’m very pessimistic. Because it’s more likely that a small minority will just try to fuck everybody else for their profit because that’s just human nature unfortunately.
- JieJie 3y ago
  I'm old. I've seen quite a lot in my lifetime. I absolutely believe it can happen. I also believe that when people have the attitude that "a small minority will just try to fuck everybody else for their profit because that’s just human nature unfortunately", a self-fulling prophesy is exactly what will happen if we don't spend our time and energy actively advocating for the other thing. Nothing happens in a vacuum. We get the government we deserve. (I hope this doesn't come off as me "dunking on" you, or whatever people do on social media. I'm not trying to attack you, but that attitude that is all-too-common on social media these days. It's defeatist and it's not going to lead to good outcomes for anyone but the people who are going to "fuck everybody else".)
  - manuelmoreale 3y ago
    > I hope this doesn't come off as me "dunking on" you, or whatever people do on social media. Nah it’s all good. I spend my time advocating for people to engage in more healthy ways, I try encourage people to blog more, to write directly to other humans via email and mail, I try to push for more genuine connections so it’s not like I think everything is doomed. But I’m also not naive when it comes to the internet or society in general. People are obsessed with money. And very few are obsessed with distributing them evenly. Even in the creators space. Which is why I wrote what I wrote. I’d LOVE for a different outcome. I just don’t expect it.
    - JieJie 3y ago
      We are on the same page. I'm just not going to give up after trying so hard. Hey, I've seen people take the high road and pass up the money and I've done the same myself. It ain't over till it's over. Wishing you all the very best.
      - manuelmoreale 3y ago
        Really appreciate this exchange and the willingness to share your thoughts. Thank you.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  It's not going to happen if we just sit around and hope for it, but since the current model for supporting creators is failing so badly, it seems likely that if somebody can get it even half way right, their system would have a huge advantage. Half-way right, in my view, would avoid most of these: - Incentivize the creation of technology that does more harm than good (e.g. DRM). - Create legal constructs that are later used for censorship. - Require that artists share profits with lawyers. - Require artists to focus mostly on stuff that's not their art. And would achieve some of these: - Citing sources is impactful. The graph structure for determining trustworthyness is what also determines payment, or credit, or warm fuzzy feelings, or whatever the relevant good thing is. - Has an culture of rewarding (and scrutinizing) curators such that successful curators only endorse content which fair about how it defers to its sources. - Supports inheritance such that making derivative works that credit their parent is easy. - Treats transport and attribution separately so that I can work with the data via whatever tool scratches the itch (e.g. rsync, and not some janky website). So yes I do think it's possible. I'm working on tooling in this imagined ecosystem. I want to use CTPH hashes (i.e. the tech used by virus scanners) to annotate bitstreams with metadata re: trustworthyness. What I don't think is possible is to take an AI's output and mapping it backwards to annotations of this type in the training data, but I'm hoping that some AI wizard comes along and shows me that I'm wrong about this.
  - manuelmoreale 3y ago
    Do you believe the reasons why the current model is failing creators is for lack of good technological tools? Because I personally believe the issues are more anthropological than technological which is precisely why I don't have much hope. Better tools can improve the situation probably, I can't say for certain because I never dived into this space but I don't think they'll solve all the issues. I'd love to be proven wrong though. I really do.
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      Yes. We're tool using primates, that quip about having only a hammer and seeing only nails is really descriptive of the human condition. There's an excellent radio-lab episode which argues that cultures don't develop a word for the color blue until they can make blue dye (and the implication is that they don't even perceive it before that). Abstractions like "value" or "property" arose organically, and if we didn't have this fixation on tools they'd likely have changed organically... But we made tools for working with those abstractions and now we live in a world shaped by those tools and it has created a sort of inertia for the old way if doing things. It's kind of like how all of the spellings stopped changing when the printing press was invented, so now we have wacky spellings like "through" that we would've moved on from had that not happened at that particular time (see: "the great vowel shift") The historical circumstance around the creation of the printing press is what gave us our notion of intellectual property to begin with, and I think it'll remain more or less unchanged until some other technology forces it to change. It's incredibly difficult to visualize a different way in our current setting, and it's especially difficult to get paid to work towards it, but I think that pretty much any change is possible given some MVP toolset that makes it doable and some critical mass of people willing to give it a try.

by JieJie 3y ago

manuelmoreale 3y ago

Do you believe it can happen? The revolution in compensation. Because as much as I’d love to see it happen, I’m very pessimistic. Because it’s more likely that a small minority will just try to fuck everybody else for their profit because that’s just human nature unfortunately.

JieJie 3y ago
I'm old. I've seen quite a lot in my lifetime. I absolutely believe it can happen. I also believe that when people have the attitude that "a small minority will just try to fuck everybody else for their profit because that’s just human nature unfortunately", a self-fulling prophesy is exactly what will happen if we don't spend our time and energy actively advocating for the other thing. Nothing happens in a vacuum. We get the government we deserve. (I hope this doesn't come off as me "dunking on" you, or whatever people do on social media. I'm not trying to attack you, but that attitude that is all-too-common on social media these days. It's defeatist and it's not going to lead to good outcomes for anyone but the people who are going to "fuck everybody else".)
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  > I hope this doesn't come off as me "dunking on" you, or whatever people do on social media. Nah it’s all good. I spend my time advocating for people to engage in more healthy ways, I try encourage people to blog more, to write directly to other humans via email and mail, I try to push for more genuine connections so it’s not like I think everything is doomed. But I’m also not naive when it comes to the internet or society in general. People are obsessed with money. And very few are obsessed with distributing them evenly. Even in the creators space. Which is why I wrote what I wrote. I’d LOVE for a different outcome. I just don’t expect it.
  - JieJie 3y ago
    We are on the same page. I'm just not going to give up after trying so hard. Hey, I've seen people take the high road and pass up the money and I've done the same myself. It ain't over till it's over. Wishing you all the very best.
    - manuelmoreale 3y ago
      Really appreciate this exchange and the willingness to share your thoughts. Thank you.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
It's not going to happen if we just sit around and hope for it, but since the current model for supporting creators is failing so badly, it seems likely that if somebody can get it even half way right, their system would have a huge advantage. Half-way right, in my view, would avoid most of these: - Incentivize the creation of technology that does more harm than good (e.g. DRM). - Create legal constructs that are later used for censorship. - Require that artists share profits with lawyers. - Require artists to focus mostly on stuff that's not their art. And would achieve some of these: - Citing sources is impactful. The graph structure for determining trustworthyness is what also determines payment, or credit, or warm fuzzy feelings, or whatever the relevant good thing is. - Has an culture of rewarding (and scrutinizing) curators such that successful curators only endorse content which fair about how it defers to its sources. - Supports inheritance such that making derivative works that credit their parent is easy. - Treats transport and attribution separately so that I can work with the data via whatever tool scratches the itch (e.g. rsync, and not some janky website). So yes I do think it's possible. I'm working on tooling in this imagined ecosystem. I want to use CTPH hashes (i.e. the tech used by virus scanners) to annotate bitstreams with metadata re: trustworthyness. What I don't think is possible is to take an AI's output and mapping it backwards to annotations of this type in the training data, but I'm hoping that some AI wizard comes along and shows me that I'm wrong about this.
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  Do you believe the reasons why the current model is failing creators is for lack of good technological tools? Because I personally believe the issues are more anthropological than technological which is precisely why I don't have much hope. Better tools can improve the situation probably, I can't say for certain because I never dived into this space but I don't think they'll solve all the issues. I'd love to be proven wrong though. I really do.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    Yes. We're tool using primates, that quip about having only a hammer and seeing only nails is really descriptive of the human condition. There's an excellent radio-lab episode which argues that cultures don't develop a word for the color blue until they can make blue dye (and the implication is that they don't even perceive it before that). Abstractions like "value" or "property" arose organically, and if we didn't have this fixation on tools they'd likely have changed organically... But we made tools for working with those abstractions and now we live in a world shaped by those tools and it has created a sort of inertia for the old way if doing things. It's kind of like how all of the spellings stopped changing when the printing press was invented, so now we have wacky spellings like "through" that we would've moved on from had that not happened at that particular time (see: "the great vowel shift") The historical circumstance around the creation of the printing press is what gave us our notion of intellectual property to begin with, and I think it'll remain more or less unchanged until some other technology forces it to change. It's incredibly difficult to visualize a different way in our current setting, and it's especially difficult to get paid to work towards it, but I think that pretty much any change is possible given some MVP toolset that makes it doable and some critical mass of people willing to give it a try.