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Every cent you spend on this, remember: The people who made this possible are not even getting a millionth of a cent for every billion USD made with it (they ar

• barnabee 6mo ago
  A lot of people here aren't going to like it, but the only reasonable way out I can see is to eventually socialise ownership and control of AI. I don't see an alternative that isn't really bad.
  • master-lincoln 6mo ago
    Seize the means of production!
    • barnabee 6mo ago
      I'll be satisfied if we just manage to seize the means of our otherwise impending servitude under corporate techno-fascism…
    • odiroot 6mo ago
      Tokens to the people!
  • user34283 6mo ago
    I figure capitalism may soon become obsolete. But I don’t think this speculation is going to make for interesting discussion on here. I find the technical discussion more interesting and could do without some of the moral grandstanding in the comments.
    • Urahandystar 6mo ago
      People say that but the quote. " I can sooner imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." Always comes back to me. Personally I think it won't be communism but communalism.
  • ap99 6mo ago
    Can you explain some of these alternatives that are so bad?
    • khafra 6mo ago
      One bad possibility is that AI & robotics advance to the point where they can do every job better and more cheaply than humans; and then humans are no longer employable and all die if they have insufficient capital to survive the period between unemployment and post-scarcity. Another possibility is that, once AI exceeds human performance in all economically useful activities, including high-level planning, governance, law enforcement, and military actions, it discovers that the benefits of keeping humans around aren't worth the costs and risks.
    • barnabee 6mo ago
      Bad: let tech (now "AI") companies, built on the collective (often in theory IP-protected) output of humanity, own and mediate an ever increasing proportion of the value created in society. Intellectual rent-seeking, if you will. Bad: the above but also their power and influence grows so much and governments are so ineffective (or corrupt) against them that the tech companies also become de facto governments and people rely on them to survive. Also they destroy earth even faster with nobody left to stop them. The full fat cyberpunk dystopia. Bad: the above but with lots more fascism and war. Too many people seem to want this. Bad: regulate AI to such an extent as to cede all growth and technological leadership to whoever doesn't ...
  • daniel_iversen 6mo ago
    Yes. And it can be done in less "communist" ways; have countries' governments invest serious capital (even if they have to raise debt - they do anyway) in income producing assets related to AI, like large stakes in AI labs, building data centres etc.
    • pchangr 6mo ago
      From my understanding, the state or community owning the means of production (in this case, ai labs) is one of the central thesis of communism.
      • daniel_iversen 6mo ago
        More like a sovereign wealth fund type of concept
    • barnabee 6mo ago
      Yes, doesn't need to be "communist" or even fully socialist. I think governments should invest in their economies - mostly by investing in research, education, infrastructure, health and wellbeing of citizens, etc. but also putting capital into the later stages of expansion would make sense. I certainly don't think people should not be able to start or own or profit from companies. But I do see a reason to limit their scale and/or make them more publicly owned beyond an certain scale. I quite like the idea that "public" markets should become truly public, e.g. by some ratcheting percentage of public companies becoming owned by society at large over time (there would be several ways this could be done). This somewhat happens with the largest companies via index funds but only for those big enough to be in the indices and the distribution in unequal. Maybe there are other/better ways, but it's pretty clear to me that big companies have a lot of negative impacts that aren't properly accounted for and so they are a very significant way in which a few people get richer at the expense of everyone else.
  • freakynit 6mo ago
    "socialise ownership and control" ... this always ends up with just one person owning(not literally) it, through sheer misuse of political power. As far as I can see as of now, there is no "realistic" way out. It's a problem of human nature... People are corrupt, people with authority are more corrupt, and people with money and authority, even more. Come intelligent and cheaply mass-produceable robots, and we'll have a new, 4th level spinup too that will be worse than the first 3, combined.
  • digdugdirk 6mo ago
    I've been thinking of ways to legally structure an Intellectual Property Cooperative, which is the only way I can think of to solve the current exploitive digital economic system.
  • lionkor 6mo ago
    I have an alternative! Regulation. A government can simply regulate what is and isn't legal, and in most of the world, that's been what governments do. I'm sure a country like the US, which is filled with lawyers, can come up with a couple laws, and find some goons to enforce it, that cannot possibly be that hard when other countries can figure it out too.
    • FrozenSynapse 6mo ago
      Who would lobby that? On the other hand there are a lot of entities that will lobby against this.
      • lionkor 6mo ago
        Again, somehow other governments in the world have figured out how to do things for the people, without a company having to lobby for it. For example USB-C ports on all devices, I don't think Xiaomi lobbied with billions and that's why the EU decided that. If companies control the government, then that's not a government, that's a group of companies.
    • jeroenhd 6mo ago
      The EU already has AI regulation and it's about as effective as you'd think it would be. The AI industry is built on mass piracy and copyright violations, regulation isn't going to make it go away or even comply any time soon. We have laws banning technology that can be used to produce generative images of someone that look like them with their clothes off. The result wasn't fixing generative AI (we don't know how to actually control that kind of thing because it's almost impossible to manually tweak a machine learning model), but to add a bunch of input and output filters that'll pass the test for most regulators checking compliance.
  • kolinko 6mo ago
    We’ll probably do the same we did with electricity, water, banking and telecomunnication - regulate (even in US) so that everyone has more or less equal access to it.
    • heddycrow 6mo ago
      Regulate so that you price out equal access to it. Small players can't afford cost of regulation. Then create a layer around that which all small players pay into so they can participate regardless of whether they do or not - something like insurance or licensing. Modernity.
• sp_c 6mo ago
  I don't understand why everyone is all up and arms about Images / Art being generated by AI, but when it comes to code... well who cares? The people who made all the code training data are also getting nothing! Potentially the one difference is that developers invented this and screwed themselves, whereas artists had nothing to do with AI.
  • happymellon 6mo ago
    > Potentially the one difference is that developers invented this and screwed themselves Hopefully you mean developers invented this and screwed over other developers. How many folks working on the code at OpenAI have meaninfully contributed to Open Source? I agree that because it is the same "job title" people might feel less sympathy but it's not the same people.
  • sandworm101 6mo ago
    Because artists generally own thier material (with exceptions at the very high end) whereas professional coders have generally abandoned ownership by seeding it as "work product" to thier employers. Copy my drawings and you steal from me, a person. Copy a bit of code or a texture pack from a game and you steal from whatever private equity owns that game studio. Private equity doesnt have feelings to hurt.
    • billynomates 6mo ago
      Arent't the models trained on open source code though? In which case OpenAI et al should be following the licenses of the code on which they are trained.
      • sandworm101 6mo ago
        Yup, but contributors to OSS have generally given away thier rights by contributing to the project per the license. So stealing from OS isnt as bad as stealing material still totally owned by an individual, such as a drawing scraped from a personal website. From a common FOSS contributor license... >>permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions... https://opensource.org/license/mit https://opensource.org/license/mit ... As opposed to a visual artist who has signed away zero rights prior to thier work being scraped for AI training. FOSS contributors can quibble about conditions but they have agreed to bulk sharing whereas visual artists have not.
• rolymath 6mo ago
  That's fine for me. As someone who can't draw or design for shit, I am getting effectively millions of dollars worth of artist time for $20/month. The solution is to socialize AI, not ban it.
• bradley13 6mo ago
  If you put stuff on the internet, people (and machines) can see it. How do you think human artists learn? By looking at other people's artwork. AI can do exactly the same thing. As for code: All of my code is open source. I don't care if people (or machines) learn from it. In fact, as a teacher, I sincerely hope that they do! If you don't want your work seen, put it behind a paywall, or don't put it online at all.
  • deepvibrations 6mo ago
    Not a fair comparison... A model can ingest a countless number works in day and reproduce stylistic fingerprints on demand, at zero marginal cost. How are the people it learned from meant to compete with that? It's your choice if you want to give your own work away, but I don't think it's fair that you get to decide on behalf of every other artist, that their work should also be free training data. Do you want all musicians and artists to put their work behind paywalls? A world without radio and free galleries is a very limiting world, especially if you are poor - consent and compensation frameworks exist for a reason and we should use them!
    • ap99 6mo ago
      It absolutely is a fair comparison. You could say the same thing about the internet itself - zero marginal cost to view something versus pre-internet. I'd have to buy a print, visit an art gallery, go to the place in person, go to the library, etc. That's all friction and cost to "ingest" art. Some of it costs something and some just the cost of going.
      • buran77 6mo ago
        > It absolutely is a fair comparison. It's not a fair comparison because it's wrong. Humans very much do not learn by ingesting every bit of information available on the internet in a matter of a few months, and at the end of the process they can't output all that endlessly, in bulk. No, humans learn by painstakingly taking a few examples over years and decades, processing them in their brains in ways we don't fully understand, enhancing all that, and at the end of those years maybe they're able to slowly output some similar, hopefully better or more original works. But by far most humans won't manage to do it even after decades of trying. Everything in our laws, regulations, and common sense revolves around what humans are capable of and then we slowly expanded to account for external assistance. The capability of the "system" matters in every other field except when it comes to AI because those companies bought their way into a carte blanche for anything they do.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• pawelduda 6mo ago
  People who provided training material for AI images, received payment in likes and shares
  • lwhi 6mo ago
    Is this satire?
    • pawelduda 6mo ago
      50% satire
      • lwhi 6mo ago
        Well, yes .. we have the freemium economy first. Fucked on the way in, fucked on the way out.
    • brohee 6mo ago
      Likely, https://www.reddit.com/r/forexposure/ https://www.reddit.com/r/forexposure/ material otherwise
• ap99 6mo ago
  If I see art and get inspired by it, then paint my own thing and make millions do I owe my inspiration money?
  • cindyllm 6mo ago
    [dead]
  • SlinkyOnStairs 6mo ago
    If you end up creating something sufficiently similar, yes in fact you do. Or rather, you have done a copyright infringement and retroactive payment may be one of the remedies. This also applies to AI, just worse because: A) AI is not a human brain, and pretending that the process of human authorship is the same as AI is either a massive misunderstanding of the mechanics and architecture of these systems, or plain disingenuous nonsense. B) AI has no capability of original thought. Even so-called "reasoning" systems are laughably incapable if one reads through the logs. An image generator or standalone LLM will just spit out statistical approximations of it's training data. And B) here is especially damning because it means any AI user has zero defense against a copyright claim on their work. This creates enormous legal risks. The model for copyright trolling is trivial. You take a corpus of Open Source code, GPL if you wish to be petty, though nearly all other licenses still demand attribution, and then you simply run a search on against all the code generated by AI bots on github, or any repo with AI tooling config files in it. Won't be long before the FSF does something similar.
    • 7tflutter7 6mo ago
      But open models are only about 8 months behind closed models. So even aggressive copyright-enforcement would only create an 8 month delay. This is essentially a LimeWire problem. And OpenAI is essentially Spotify. Even with revenue sharing, 99% of artists will get nothing (just like streaming), and revenue will be much lower than before (just like streaming compared to record era). Only IP giants like Disney would see any real income.
  • lionkor 6mo ago
    Yes, you do owe the inspiration money if the result is close enough. Welcome to intellectual property laws!
• tgv 6mo ago
  > except you get shafted That's the point, isn't it? Creating images via AI offers nothing to society. Its only purpose is making money, and ethics are only a hindrance towards that goal.
  • kolinko 6mo ago
    I did a lot of AI images to show my friends and enjoy. There was definitely a benefit to society. And my friends used AI as a replacement of stock photos and graphics in their products which offer a ton to society.
    • tgv 6mo ago
      > There was definitely a benefit to society. Because otherwise they would have gone out to the street and mugged old ladies? > And my friends used AI as a replacement of stock photos and graphics in their products which offer a ton to society. Yeah, that's the negative contribution. They're basically ripping off artists and designers. If those products offer a ton, some of that money could have gone towards them instead of OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.
  • 7tflutter7 6mo ago
    'I dislike AI, therefore it has no value to anyone.' Who knew the international unit of truth was your feelings?
    • Jtarii 6mo ago
      Generative art has negative value, saying it has no value is far too generous. It actively makes the world a worse place.
      • 7tflutter7 6mo ago
        There is a 100% chance you will consume games / movies / media that was at least in part generated by AI, and enjoy it. The idea that 50 years from you will still be holding out is hilarious.
• yen223 6mo ago
  Is there a reason why you chose to post this comment for free, without rewards, knowing full well it's going to end up in the training data of some LLM in the future?
  • lionkor 6mo ago
    Well, the way intellectual property works, anything I write on the internet is, by default, all rights reserved. Different website's policies will impact this, of course, and different laws (and quirks like "fair use") as well, but in general, if I write a snippet of code like: printf("%p\n", 0xbeefbeef); /* insert awesome new compression algorithm here */ Then no, I'm not providing it for free. In fact, all rights are reserved. Don't see a license? Then you don't have the right to use it e.g. to build a product.
    • matt_kantor 6mo ago
      The question was about a comment you posted on this specific site, whose terms[0] say: > By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed. [0]: https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/
• lxgr 6mo ago
  > It's like open source, except you get shafted. Do you mean copyleft? Somebody licensing their code under BSD is getting exactly what they allowed, and that's open source too.
  • lionkor 6mo ago
    No, they aren't. Clause 1 of the "modern" BSD license is > 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. It's a license, not a free giveaway. You have to follow the terms of the license. Same for MIT, by the way; you have to retain the copyright notice.
    • lxgr 6mo ago
      Fair point, but would you say it would meaningfully change things if all LLMs were to ship with a wall of text of all BSD attributions that were found in the training set?
      • lionkor 6mo ago
        No, of course not. The issue is that code was copied and used, without adhering to the license, as training data. Even before training started, that's not right. That's the issue. All of this would not be possible if laws were adhered to. This is very much a "the end justifies the means" situation. The same could be argued about e.g. the Netherlands and genocide/slavery. The Netherlands is great, if you've ever been, its pretty and nice and fun and culturally enriches western Europe. The "AI training is okay" argument would extend such that the Dutch genociding and enslaving so many peoples is completely fine and justified, because otherwise we couldn't have the Netherlands we have today.
        • lxgr 6mo ago
          I'm not arguing that it's generally and automatically ok, I'm just saying that it's probably also not right to see it as entirely and inherently immoral, and that some people are probably fine with their contributions to the public domain being used in it. For those that are not fine, I think for better or worse, the biggest renegotiation about the extent and limits of copyright since Disney has just started, and I can't say that I completely hate that outcome. (I do find it quite telling that this is what it took, though.)
• ACCount37 6mo ago
  If "people who made this possible" were getting their fair share, "a millionth of a cent for every billion USD made with it" would be about it for the artists. What makes the dataset valuable isn't that the image 0012992 in it is precious and irreplaceable. It's that the index goes to seven digits. Pre-training is very much a matter of scale - and scraping is merely the easiest way to get data at scale. People who complain about "artists not getting paid" must have in their imagination some kind of counterfactual where artists are being paid thousands for their contributions. That's not how it works. A counterfactual world where artists were paid for AI training is one where an average artist is 5 cents richer, an average image generation AI performs 5% worse, and the bulk of extra data spending is captured by platforms selling stock photos and companies destructively digitizing physical media.
  • lionkor 6mo ago
    The ideal world would be one where, to train on art, you have to buy a license to that art. Sure, for most artists they would maybe put a low price tag, but that isn't the point. The point isn't about money. It's that copies were made, without license and without permission, and without any legal right to do so, of art, and then used to train a system which generates similar art. The first step, the copy, is illegal without a license, and even for most public images online, licenses and copyright notices (which must be preserved) are attached.
    • kolinko 6mo ago
      Ideal for whom? For society in general, I don’t think so.
      • peepee1982 6mo ago
        I think it would obviously better for society.
      • bigfishrunning 6mo ago
        I think you may be placing too much value on the output of these machines which use tons of energy, generate pollution (both noise and chemical), and generate output that's worse then what a human can do. We would be better off if these LLMs didn't exist.
• retrac98 6mo ago
  Repeat ad infinitum through history. Old ways of making a living getting commoditised is just the price of technological progress. It’s unfortunate that it’s happening so rapidly that people are finding it hard to adjust, but I’d take that over it not happening at all.
  • lionkor 6mo ago
    Do the ends always justify the means?
    • retrac98 6mo ago
      Not in every instance, but in aggregate technological progress has clearly been beneficial. Just look at living conditions, infant mortality, life expectancy or education. You could be anywhere on the planet relative to me and I can talk to you for free, instantaneously at any time. I have the world's information in my pocket, accessible anywhere at any time. I could go on!
    • SkyBelow 6mo ago
      It seems most takes on this are that ends either always or never justify the means, but rarely is their discussion on the option that they can and developing a system of when they do and don't. At least in the general public discourse I've seen involving means and ends.
  • freedomben 6mo ago
    It is amazing how often the argument parallels one such as, "But I deserve to be able to make a living as a chandler or a wheelwright even in 2026!" I would truly love if we could all make a living doing what we want to do (I'd be doing a lot of different things if that were the case), but that just isn't the reality of markets/technological progress.
• arghwhat 6mo ago
  This is, in my opinion, attempting to say the right thing with entirely the wrong perspective: The people you say are getting "shafted" always got shafted. Their works are the inspiration for all artists and people who lay their eyes on it - maybe they got paid when they made the work, maybe they managed to sell it, but probably not. And still, other artists (and machines) will use remember and be inspired by it, sometimes to the point of verbatim copy (which is extremely common for human artists as well, with verbatim copy and replication being an actual sought after skill). (Those about to shout "LICENSING", that's a very new invention and we're terrible at it. What are you going to do, cut out the part of your brain that formed new connections while touching GPL code?) The person (singular) that is actually getting "shafted" at each use is the artist you didn't hire to do the job of making your new work, because it is their skill that got replaced. A skill build from a lifetime of studying other art and practicing themselves, replaced with a skill build from a machine studying other art and by virtue of some closed loops likely also "practicing" itself. Still, shafting at large, but the obsession with training data is misplaced in that it entirely ignores how society and art worked beforehand. At the same time, for most of the things you're likely using the tool for, there would probably would never have been an artist in the first place. For example, if you're just making your powerpoint prettier, or if your commission is ridiculous as it often is and yet only willing to offer a single-digit dollar sum per work which no artist should take (RIP the poor souls that take such work anyway).
  • rasKqa 6mo ago
    Children can draw without ever having been to an art gallery. The IP laundromats need the entire stolen corpus of human labor. The latter is clearly an infringing derivative work. It will be true no matter who many bribes those who have never created anything pay to Marsha Blackburn (who miraculously reversed her AI skepticism). I wonder how many threats of being primaried have been issued by the uncreative technocrat thieves.
    • strulovich 6mo ago
      No they can’t just draw by themselves. It’s extremely bad and random. Their teachers teach them from a very early age how to hold a carton, and how to draw. Maybe some miraculous humans will reinvent all drawing of growing by themselves in the jungle, most people will not. Source: I have kids.
• nlitened 6mo ago
  It’s about time we shaft the gatekeepers of talent, and redistribute and socialize the means of art production.
  • bigfishrunning 6mo ago
    The "Gatekeepers of talent" are generally people who worked very hard to hone a craft. Nothing is stopping you from working very hard to create something.
    • nlitened 6mo ago
      Yep, that’s the irony, that’s why I’m being tongue in cheek about Marxists’ “seize the means of production”, because people who produce capital also work very hard
• notTheLastMan 6mo ago
  ok. Anyway it made a super cool picture for me. It made me smile. Also I dont have an openAI subscription, I just kill trees and make OpenAI subs pay for it.
• makerofthings 6mo ago
  It’s making a tiny number of people richer and a very large number of people poorer. It isn’t going to end well.
• uxcolumbo 6mo ago
  So what's the solution? Not using AI?
  • bigfishrunning 6mo ago
    Exactly this. You don't need it. Nobody does.
    • uxcolumbo 6mo ago
      Yeah not a realistic scenario. AI is immensely useful and if applied correctly will help humanity. The question is how do you reign in the robber barons, who just want to use AI to maintain their status quo and extract more and more profit from the system.
      • bigfishrunning 6mo ago
        > AI is immensely useful Right up until you need to do something you can't plagiarize > if applied correctly will help humanity. It isn't and won't be. Its entire purpose is to plagiarize artists, writers, and programmers, and to slowly whittle away those professions as viable. When there are no engineers left, we'll go back to sticks and stones I guess.
        • Jtarii 6mo ago
          AI output is obviously transformative and would be protected by fair use. The argument is about whether the training data was stolen. (which it was)
    • Levitz 6mo ago
      Then what's the problem? Nobody needs it, nobody will use it, it will just die off.
  • heddycrow 6mo ago
    Support continued development of AI in the open. Support use of local or small scale AI. Your usage, support, and attention matters.
• ProfessorZoom 6mo ago
  Dune movie was inspired by Apocalypse Now, with even several shots being exact copies, but Francis Ford Coppola isn't getting a penny!
  • ritratt 6mo ago
    Wrong. Creators/Writers of Dune paid money to watch Apocalypse Now.
• remify 6mo ago
  My vision for a new internet is a space where we can guarantee something is coming from an human and is genuine. The second point is that we get paid for feeding our AI overlords
• PUSH_AX 6mo ago
  The hardest part about human creativity is hiding (and not paying royalties to) your influences.
• unsupp0rted 6mo ago
  This doesn’t bother me one bit. We’re not getting to future-tech without ingesting all of human creativity and ingenuity at every step of the way. Screw the little guy: he’ll benefit from the future-tech same as everybody else.
  • lionkor 6mo ago
    Or not, it doesn't really matter and nobody seems to care. This isn't for the good of humanity, there's no indication that it is
• itvision 6mo ago
  I will remember that AI removes repetitive, tedious work and frees actual creators to achieve things that have never been done before. Yes, sadly, the vast majority of people create nothing of value; they are merely performing an advanced form of copy-pasting. That certainly includes me. Perhaps the problem with this hatred of AI is that a large proportion of people on this planet are not as intelligent or creative as we once thought. Their work will be almost entirely automated.
  • avgDev 6mo ago
    I've wrote a warehouse management system, and other apps for a medium sized business. It is running the business. I helped changed how the business operates. However, I really did not create anything that has not existed before. I just learned how to write code and applied it. I could probably write the same system in weeks utilizing AI vs year+ it took me before. I have fixed feelings about AI, on one hand I hate tedious coding tasks, writing tests, fixing small logical bugs. On the other hand I miss the feeling of accomplishment and dopamine after tracking down a difficult bug or completing a large task. I also do find it funny how large businesses are embracing AI but AI can empower smaller devs to create products that will compete with large business. I do wonder how the future will look like.
• inquirerGeneral 6mo ago
  [dead]
• b65e8bee43c2ed0 6mo ago
  let's not pretend that it would make any difference if these models were trained with only licensed data. you folx would still decry this technology. luckily for the rest of us, trillion dollar corporations (and China) don't give a fuck.
  • lionkor 6mo ago
    Weird hypothetical. Not sure who "you folx" is. For me, that would solve my issue with it.
    • b65e8bee43c2ed0 6mo ago
      yeah, well, you're an oddity then. for the luddites, copyright is just one angle, then there's electricity, water, and all the other things they didn't care about at any point prior to 2023. they just want this technology outlawed, or at the very least condemned and deemed unacceptable.
• ChrisRR 6mo ago
  poring* over