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I hear what you're saying, but I have to say that I think you're conflating bad management practices with the effects of generative AI. The artist's boss sound

I hear what you're saying, but I have to say that I think you're conflating bad management practices with the effects of generative AI. The artist's boss sounds like a clown following a bandwagon and creating a toxic work environment at the same time. Hope your friend is able to break free, because if AI isn't what eventually drives them to go postal in that workplace, something else will. As for copyright, that's a matter for the courts and legislature to decide. If copyright maximalism wins, such that training is not considered fair use, or that liability for infringement attaches to the trainer of the model rather than its users, it will really do a number on American competitiveness. Such a decision would transfer an enormous amount of power to countries that DGAF about copyright law. The most competitive AI models are always going to rely on snarfing up as much data as possible, legally or otherwise, and I'm OK with that. Copyright is a recent invention, historically speaking; we got along fine without it for thousands of years. What happening in AI, on the other hand, can potentially take us to the next level as a species. If that means the end of copyright as a concept, so be it. My big concern is that like most futures (to paraphrase Gibson), this one won't exactly be equally distributed.

palata 2y ago
> I think you're conflating bad management practices with the effects of generative AI. I kindly disagree :-). Management is about increasing profit, not improving the product. And we see the results: arguably most products are worse today than they were 10 years ago. Software is a great example of that: the hardware made huge progress, but the resulting software is slightly worse than it was with hardware orders of magnitudes slower. > As for copyright, that's a matter for the courts and legislature to decide. Unfortunately, I think the US are showing us differently. The billionaires decide and again, they optimise their profit. > What happening in AI, on the other hand, can potentially take us to the next level as a species. All the established science says that we are about to collapse (most species are, already: we are the cause of the current mass extinction that is the fastest in the history of the planet). We don't have a solution to the energy problem, and we're running out of time. We don't have a solution to the climate problem, and we're running out of time. And we don't have a solution to the biodiversity, that is well into a mass extinction. There is one thing we know we can do: start doing less with less, adapt our society to handle the coming changes as well as possible and accept that it will be worse than today anyway. The direction we are taking, though, is what you suggest: hope for a miracle, hope for what we don't know. "Maybe technology will save us". Sure. Maybe god will, too. Feels unlikely to me.

palata 2y ago

> I think you're conflating bad management practices with the effects of generative AI. I kindly disagree :-). Management is about increasing profit, not improving the product. And we see the results: arguably most products are worse today than they were 10 years ago. Software is a great example of that: the hardware made huge progress, but the resulting software is slightly worse than it was with hardware orders of magnitudes slower. > As for copyright, that's a matter for the courts and legislature to decide. Unfortunately, I think the US are showing us differently. The billionaires decide and again, they optimise their profit. > What happening in AI, on the other hand, can potentially take us to the next level as a species. All the established science says that we are about to collapse (most species are, already: we are the cause of the current mass extinction that is the fastest in the history of the planet). We don't have a solution to the energy problem, and we're running out of time. We don't have a solution to the climate problem, and we're running out of time. And we don't have a solution to the biodiversity, that is well into a mass extinction. There is one thing we know we can do: start doing less with less, adapt our society to handle the coming changes as well as possible and accept that it will be worse than today anyway. The direction we are taking, though, is what you suggest: hope for a miracle, hope for what we don't know. "Maybe technology will save us". Sure. Maybe god will, too. Feels unlikely to me.