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You can only use each barrel of oil once, so it is not remotely the same thing. It's like torrenting a movie vs stealing someone's car. My labor has been comp

You can only use each barrel of oil once, so it is not remotely the same thing. It's like torrenting a movie vs stealing someone's car. My labor has been compensated and nothing has been extracted.

drooby 7mo ago
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.
- terminalshort 7mo ago
  Typically you don't get compensated for secondary or higher order value generated by your work. Every software startup today is only possible because of the massive amount of collective effort to build the computing hardware that it runs on and the work to construct the actual physical network of the internet. But that doesn't mean that you have to pay all those people for that work just because your company ends up making billions. Or you could say that actually the company does pay those people indirectly through all the economic activity and tax revenue generated. AI is the same. No special rules are needed.
  - drooby 7mo ago
    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.
ajam1507 7mo ago
How is an author fairly compensated when you torrent their book? Should we just stop paying for media because it's infinitely reproducible? Nothing physical is being stolen when a company makes a clone of a product based on another company's designs, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have patent laws.
- hntway5994 7mo ago
  Purely anecdotal I know of a fair few creatives who ultimately are just happy people enjoy their works and don't really care how they're getting it. I understand that's a privileged attitude in the current world as they are all living relatively comfortable lives but at least philosophically I agree with it. We as humans have done a lot to reduce scarcity for a great deal many things but we still cling to it as an idea because of stubbornness and greed. Maybe I'll get labeled a 'commie' for saying all this but I think we create a world where everyones needs are met and things(information & media are the easiest imo) are freely available. Thinking we can't do this is a bit of a disservice to the capabilities of humans.
- terminalshort 7mo ago
  The author is not fairly compensated in that case, but if you buy the book, he is. If you bought books and learned to code from them and then went on to go found a startup that ended up being worth billions, you don't owe that author one dollar more than you already paid him when you bought his book. That's more like the AI case here.
  - ajam1507 7mo ago
    Except the "person" reading the book is a corporation worth billions and you didn't get any money from them.

You can only use each barrel of oil once, so it is not remotely the same thing. It's like torrenting a movie vs stealing someone's car. My labor has been compensated and nothing has been extracted.

drooby 7mo ago

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.

terminalshort 7mo ago
Typically you don't get compensated for secondary or higher order value generated by your work. Every software startup today is only possible because of the massive amount of collective effort to build the computing hardware that it runs on and the work to construct the actual physical network of the internet. But that doesn't mean that you have to pay all those people for that work just because your company ends up making billions. Or you could say that actually the company does pay those people indirectly through all the economic activity and tax revenue generated. AI is the same. No special rules are needed.
- drooby 7mo ago
  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.

ajam1507 7mo ago

How is an author fairly compensated when you torrent their book? Should we just stop paying for media because it's infinitely reproducible? Nothing physical is being stolen when a company makes a clone of a product based on another company's designs, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have patent laws.

hntway5994 7mo ago
Purely anecdotal I know of a fair few creatives who ultimately are just happy people enjoy their works and don't really care how they're getting it. I understand that's a privileged attitude in the current world as they are all living relatively comfortable lives but at least philosophically I agree with it. We as humans have done a lot to reduce scarcity for a great deal many things but we still cling to it as an idea because of stubbornness and greed. Maybe I'll get labeled a 'commie' for saying all this but I think we create a world where everyones needs are met and things(information & media are the easiest imo) are freely available. Thinking we can't do this is a bit of a disservice to the capabilities of humans.
terminalshort 7mo ago
The author is not fairly compensated in that case, but if you buy the book, he is. If you bought books and learned to code from them and then went on to go found a startup that ended up being worth billions, you don't owe that author one dollar more than you already paid him when you bought his book. That's more like the AI case here.
- ajam1507 7mo ago
  Except the "person" reading the book is a corporation worth billions and you didn't get any money from them.