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> Relatively few budding artists can count on private patronage or government sponsorship, and both of these come with plenty of strings attached. It follows t

by ethbr1 2y ago

> Relatively few budding artists can count on private patronage or government sponsorship, and both of these come with plenty of strings attached. It follows that mass-AI adoption should tilt the creative economic model more towards state-funding, ideally supported by a tax on AI usage. (i.e. taxing and reallocating some of the value saved by using it, to redress the things it's probably destroying)

klyrs 2y ago
> ideally supported by a tax on AI usage. Curious to see how you'd write this legislation. Because I know a lot of programmers and lawyers, and they're all a lot better at finding loopholes than preventing them.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Target AI infrastructure providers. Ideally metered by perf-per-energy-per-time. You'll tax out some low-value use cases, but that seems less concerning as long as the tax rates are kept modest (<10%).
  - klyrs 2y ago
    Those are some pretty high-level bullet points. Say I'd like to build out a rendering farm with a bunch of GPUs to support the movie industry. On paper, my hardware is good for rendering, crypto, and AI. Do I get taxed?
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      If it were going to be implemented, I think only imposing it on large+ clouds that offer IaaS/PaaS would make sense. That would simplify collection and traceability. And a bit of extra pressure on decentralization wouldn't be the worst thing.
gruez 2y ago
>state-funding, ideally supported by a tax on AI usage Why should the state be funding artists in the first place? If the public can't be convinced to patronize artists directly (eg. buying their stuff), what makes you think they'd want to be compelled to fund artists via taxation?
- ethbr1 2y ago
  For the same reason democratic states should fund news and education -- because it's in the public's interest to have these things. And because when you run a capitalist economy, things that aren't profitable... don't spontaneously spring into existence at scale. Unlike the travesty we made of rolling out social media, maybe we should think about what AI will cannibalize in the future, what we'd like to keep, and set up systems to financially support those things? Personally, I'd rather not live in a future where all music, art, and news is the same milquetoast pablum regurgitated by an LLM. But that means finding an economic model where not-that is feasible.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >For the same reason democratic states should fund news and education -- because it's in the public's interest to have these things. Is it? What are we going to miss out on if art's purely commercial? The most visible art that the public sees is already commercial, whether it's music on spotify or movies in theaters. Hell, even most art that's in museums are commissions funded by wealthy patrons. If anything, government funded art is a recent phenomena, and we have gotten along just fine without it.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      > What are we going to miss out on if art's purely commercial? Opinions that are commercially unpopular, and the larger and more diverse talent pool to generate art of all sorts. Patronage is a corrupting influence, and I'd feel much better about most art being funded through public grants (even via a baroque allocation system) than by Starbucks. Because it's funny, labor organization never seems to come up as a theme in Starbucks-sponsored art... > If anything, government funded art is a recent phenomena That's stretching the truth a bit, or are we not considering the Catholic Church or Medicis government? Or not recent? (to pull the most pop-culture examples, without delving into the actual royal courts/republics)

by ethbr1 2y ago

klyrs 2y ago

> ideally supported by a tax on AI usage. Curious to see how you'd write this legislation. Because I know a lot of programmers and lawyers, and they're all a lot better at finding loopholes than preventing them.

ethbr1 2y ago
Target AI infrastructure providers. Ideally metered by perf-per-energy-per-time. You'll tax out some low-value use cases, but that seems less concerning as long as the tax rates are kept modest (<10%).
- klyrs 2y ago
  Those are some pretty high-level bullet points. Say I'd like to build out a rendering farm with a bunch of GPUs to support the movie industry. On paper, my hardware is good for rendering, crypto, and AI. Do I get taxed?
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    If it were going to be implemented, I think only imposing it on large+ clouds that offer IaaS/PaaS would make sense. That would simplify collection and traceability. And a bit of extra pressure on decentralization wouldn't be the worst thing.

gruez 2y ago

>state-funding, ideally supported by a tax on AI usage Why should the state be funding artists in the first place? If the public can't be convinced to patronize artists directly (eg. buying their stuff), what makes you think they'd want to be compelled to fund artists via taxation?

ethbr1 2y ago
For the same reason democratic states should fund news and education -- because it's in the public's interest to have these things. And because when you run a capitalist economy, things that aren't profitable... don't spontaneously spring into existence at scale. Unlike the travesty we made of rolling out social media, maybe we should think about what AI will cannibalize in the future, what we'd like to keep, and set up systems to financially support those things? Personally, I'd rather not live in a future where all music, art, and news is the same milquetoast pablum regurgitated by an LLM. But that means finding an economic model where not-that is feasible.
- gruez 2y ago
  >For the same reason democratic states should fund news and education -- because it's in the public's interest to have these things. Is it? What are we going to miss out on if art's purely commercial? The most visible art that the public sees is already commercial, whether it's music on spotify or movies in theaters. Hell, even most art that's in museums are commissions funded by wealthy patrons. If anything, government funded art is a recent phenomena, and we have gotten along just fine without it.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    > What are we going to miss out on if art's purely commercial? Opinions that are commercially unpopular, and the larger and more diverse talent pool to generate art of all sorts. Patronage is a corrupting influence, and I'd feel much better about most art being funded through public grants (even via a baroque allocation system) than by Starbucks. Because it's funny, labor organization never seems to come up as a theme in Starbucks-sponsored art... > If anything, government funded art is a recent phenomena That's stretching the truth a bit, or are we not considering the Catholic Church or Medicis government? Or not recent? (to pull the most pop-culture examples, without delving into the actual royal courts/republics)