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I feel like AI has gotten to the point where the message is: If you want to make something (art/code/music/writing) you can do it for your own enjoyment, but y

I feel like AI has gotten to the point where the message is: If you want to make something (art/code/music/writing) you can do it for your own enjoyment, but you aren't allowed to make money from it anymore; only the large corporations can make money from content. If you do release something creative, it'll just be fed back into the machine to be copied over and over.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
Forgeties79 5mo ago
A big corporation using LLM’s to pump out lazy “art” gets the exact same scrutiny from me.
barnabee 5mo ago
Needs to be inverted. Tax excess tech profits that derive from the efforts of others and use the proceeds to fund living artists. Vaguely analogous to levies on blank cassettes that went to offset piracy. Give the money directly to actual artists, not labels/publishers, though.
- wahnfrieden 5mo ago
  You’re describing a social revolution. Otherwise there is no way that leaders whose power over us corrupts them would want to put that into law. The cassette reference was a tax on consumers to send money upward. What you’re describing is the complete inverse.
  - lkrubner 5mo ago
    No, it is exactly the same thing. The tax on cassettes raised money that was given to artists.
    - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
      Thanks for correcting
- perilunar 5mo ago
  Don't tax profits (or incomes) at all. Tax land and resource use instead. And treat the knowledge that was used to train the AIs as one of those resources.
overgard 5mo ago
I imagine it'll take a functional legal body to do this IE maybe europe, but I think there should be a legally binding set of metadata you can attach to images to specify that they must not be used for training (with real penalties if companies are caught)
- zoom6628 5mo ago
  Agree. Should be legally required for all web hosted pictures to be AI poisoned except with explicit verifiable opt out. Same for text. Needs some institution with many geek supporters and or large tools, like Wikipedia or EFF to wage a campaign of scanning the web for materials used without permission and then loading the courts with cases of probable non-consensual usage. May not change billionaire behaviour but perhaps will change consumer behaviour.
- noobermin 5mo ago
  Of course just like they did with engineering IP china will not respect such a thing.
jpkw 5mo ago
At least for art - I don't think you'll find anyone who actually enjoys art hanging up anything produced by AI on their walls. For these kinds of "customers", they could equally easily frame & hang up a poster of the Mona Lisa. Artists are not at threat, if anything, AI makes original artworks more precious & enjoyable.
- yakattak 5mo ago
  That's assuming that the only market is stuff people are hanging up. The games industry, one that already takes advantage of its workers, is going to love this to the detriment of really passionate artists who love their craft and industry.
  - HDThoreaun 5mo ago
    genAI is going to be great for indie games. Solo productions are much easier to produce and will only get easier as tooling improves. I sort of see this as a spotify moment I guess. A democratizing force that will allow many more people to get paid for their art but with much less job security and often as a second job. Whether that's a good thing is certainly up for debate but I think as a consumer it's probably good for me.
    - bpavuk 5mo ago
      well, GenAI is an ultimate prototyping machine. I keep repeating that so often that autocomplete on my phone already learned it. look at Clair Obscur - this game did use GenAI internally for textures and forgot to clean up in ONE place. they were sorry for that and thanked the community for pointing out. naturally, Twitter and Bluesky went equally mad at Sandfall just for the mere fact of usage, but that didn't disqualify them from The Game Awards, as you can tell from how many awards they got. Expedition 33 nailed music, aesthetics, and narrative, and I am glad that they took a diffusion model for what it is, not for what marketing wants you to believe. although the game itself would benefit from one or two months dedicated exclusively to optimization, it is THE reference of how generative technology can be used - purely internally, to ideate and iterate at the pace of your taste and a bunch of H200s. we are aware of that process detail purely because they slipped in one place and got briefly "owned" by Twitter.
nicbou 5mo ago
No money and no audience. Recognition and gratitude keeps me going. Money pays the bills, but if that was the only concern, I'd still be a software developer. Anonymously feeding the slop machine is nothing like it.
archagon 5mo ago
I’m itching for some sort of no-training license: This content must not be used for training or refining generative AI. If it is, rest assured that if and when the regulatory environment around training data shifts in any country where we have legal standing, we will pursue legal action. Maybe even with a class action element: any lawsuit stemming from a violation of this license shall cover all other violations at the same time.
soundworlds 5mo ago
As someone who simultaneously makes music professionally, and works in IT professionally, it has been really interesting watching GenAI unfold, and the diverging cultures around it. It is almost like the world is splitting into two "societies": 1. One that loves AI + Big Business + very fast Innovation and disruption 2. One that loves Artisanal work + Small Business + slower but more sustainable innovation I personally prefer living in #2, but I can totally see both "societies" continuing to exist and develop in their own ways. Of course there is always the reality that different societies always end up interacting and affecting eachother.
- archagon 5mo ago
  I am waiting for the online reification of this split with bated breath so that I can fuck off to society #2 and never have to interact with society #1 again.
  - AlexCoventry 5mo ago
    Isn't society #1 going to outcompeted #2?
    - archagon 5mo ago
      They can do whatever they want. Their cultural output is completely and utterly uninteresting to me.
    - soundworlds 5mo ago
      In the short term, probably. In the long term, probably not.
  - sph 5mo ago
    You are already part of society #2. You are just giving your life, energy and money every day to society #1.
- jongjong 5mo ago
  I'm not too worried about it because the first segment of society is doomed to be 'good but never great.' AI lacks the ability to identify greatness because it's trained on the output of the average person who also lacks this ability. It's going to create a new elite class of people who have good taste and the masses who have bad taste. Many current elites will end up with the masses. They may retain their wealth on paper, but it will be a cheap, low-quality existence but they will be convinced it's luxury. I think eventually, everyone will get what they want, but not everyone will get what they need.
metrognome 5mo ago
The rhetoric of this comment seems to imply that this is a bad thing, but is it really? If it becomes more difficult to make money through creative endeavors, then that leaves us with fewer reasons to be creative other than for the sake of self-expression... which is what we want, right?
- scared_together 5mo ago
  If self-expression doesn’t put food on the table, it will become monopolized by those who were already well-fed doing something else.
- lofaszvanitt 5mo ago
  Sometimes I have the feeling people here are actually braindead or pretending to be or lots of bots around. Anyway. How do you self express yourself without money? And without an audience?
- Forgeties79 5mo ago
  That only works in a society that doesn’t put such a high premium on productivity as it is defined by how much revenue it generates and vague notions of class (“this is a real job, that is not a real job). We shit on people who work jobs we need/utilize the services of despite the fact that they work as hard as any of us do because we’re too good for that work. The defining factors? We pay them poorly, they get no PTO or parental leave, etc. Because we don’t value them. It’s a vicious feedback loop. We saw this in the 80’s through 2000’s. All parents told their kids was “go to college or you’ll become a mechanic.” Then everyone went to college at all costs and then they were told “well that’s what you get for taking on loans for college. Should’ve been sensible and gone to trade school to become a mechanic.” Of course this is never their kid. Their kid was supposed to college. Everyone else was supposed to go to trade school. I highly recommend everyone read the comic Godshaper. It’s 2 trades (10 or 12 issues can’t remember) and it highlights this dynamic in a way that is impossible to overstate.
Falimonda 5mo ago
This is hyperscale remix culture. AI is an accelerant. Find things that cannot be accelerated!
EvanAnderson 5mo ago
I would assume the publishing industry loves this.
beloch 5mo ago
There seem to be two possibilities: 1. AI can't do some things humans can, and that doesn't change. 2. AI turns into something that can do everything. Humans become unnecessary. We're currently at #1. Google may want to keep you in their AI playpen so all your clicks can be monetized directly to them, but they still need the data humans are creating. They're just not paying for it. In world #1, humans will get less work, but creative and original work will still be valued because AI can't do it. There will, of course, need to be support for all the people striving to create such work while they're gaining the skills to do so. In world #2, humans are getting no work. Neither one of these worlds functions if all the proceeds of work go to a small number of billionaires. Wealth will need to be redistributed so people can live and, if still necessary, do the things AI can't. Regulations need to catch up with what Google is trying to do here. It's currently theft and, even if we reach the point where they no longer need to crawl the web for input to their AI, their wealth will need to be redistributed. Sucking the entirety of human knowledge into a LLM and then profiting off of it without paying the humans who created that knowledge is not a business model that can remain legal for long.
georgeecollins 5mo ago
As someone (like other who have posted) who has made my living my whole life making art/ code, this is completely wrong! What it threatened is the ad based "content" models where you put stuff up for free and sell ads against it. There's lots of ways to make money from any creative endeavor that has a lasting audience. I don't know if that includes talking into your phone or writing a personal journal about productivity hacks. Things you make that are really good: a novel, a game, a short film, a song are still very valuable.
lofaszvanitt 5mo ago
Well people need to wake up and make their own ventures and vote with their wallets.
- DarkUranium 4mo ago
  Voting with one's wallet pretty much never worked (with few exceptions). The conspiracy theorist in me suspects pushing this is astroturfing by the very aristocracy, to shift blame onto people (same with environment and such, but that one's been proven time and time again).
Eyeland0 5mo ago
"And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity." -William S. Burroughs
- pembrook 5mo ago
  Yes, the craft to mass production pipeline (democratization) is frustrating for the individual craftsman, as has been true for hundreds of years. AI is simply the assembly line for the digital realm. It takes the trendy products of the rich (custom software, McKinsey PowerPoint decks, etc) and mass produces them in the same style so everyone can afford to buy them at Walmart. For things where the exclusivity WAS the value (like McKinsey consulting PowerPoints), they may fall out of fashion altogether when everyone can have them. Like performative 17th century aristocrat clothing styles. I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing hand-loomed fabrics and bespoke clothing and $5,000 cobbler-pounded leather boots while typing angrily on their keyboards. I also don’t see anyone commissioning artisan chair makers and blacksmiths to create $10,000+ custom furniture to sit on while posting pessimistic comments to HN. Nobody here seems to want to hire a carriage maker to build a custom $400,000 automobile, they seem to all go for mass produced models, betraying the local artisans. The hypocrisy is downright silly. The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans (and ultimately the artisans benefit too given nobody is a true artisan in more than a few things). This ultimately raises living standards for everyone.
  - AlecSchueler 5mo ago
    > The hypocrisy is downright silly. > The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans And in this case it's looking more like less than 1% benefiting at the expense of 85%? > I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing ... commissioning ... I would love to order more bespoke goods but mass production has driven most of the makers out of business and that ones that remain I can't afford. You're saying this as though I actually wanted this ugly IKEA closet.
    - 5mo ago
Frieren 5mo ago
> only the large corporations can make money from content. It is an aristocratic tax. Nobility has the right to profit on everything that the peasants produce. The peasants can keep enough to survive, everything else should be extracted. The middle ages didnt happen because people was stupid but because there is a pressure for the money elite to extract as much value as possible. Democracy was designed to control that bad outcome, but the new aristocracy (billionaires, CEOs, etc.) is trying to kill democracy for good. If the average working class Joe wants to have something more than scraps we are going to need to take power back and fix democracy. Google is just a symptom of the disease.
pjmlp 5mo ago
Additionally, the only developers allowed to work as such, are the ones employed at such corporations, everyone else though luck.
tim333 5mo ago
Maybe more both artists and corporations try to make money but AI has tipped the competitive ground in the corporations favour? I've seen the kind of effect a bit with hotels - hotels, booking.com etc, and Google all want to make money but customers tend to google 'hotels in' wherever and Google sells ads against that to the highest bidder which ends up pocketing most of the profits.
oort-cloud9 5mo ago
[dead]
_DeadFred_ 5mo ago
I feel like its the weirdest/most unexpected way to reach a Harrison Bergeron style reality. Everything will flattened to the most plain/mediocre level.
graemep 5mo ago
If you look at the development of copyright law it started to protect the profits of businesses (the Statute of Queen Ann was, at leat in part, intended to compensate members of the Stationers' Company for loss of their monopoly), then maybe improved somewhat, but for the last few decades has been driven by big business lobbying.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

Forgeties79 5mo ago

A big corporation using LLM’s to pump out lazy “art” gets the exact same scrutiny from me.

barnabee 5mo ago

Needs to be inverted. Tax excess tech profits that derive from the efforts of others and use the proceeds to fund living artists. Vaguely analogous to levies on blank cassettes that went to offset piracy. Give the money directly to actual artists, not labels/publishers, though.

wahnfrieden 5mo ago
You’re describing a social revolution. Otherwise there is no way that leaders whose power over us corrupts them would want to put that into law. The cassette reference was a tax on consumers to send money upward. What you’re describing is the complete inverse.
- lkrubner 5mo ago
  No, it is exactly the same thing. The tax on cassettes raised money that was given to artists.
  - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
    Thanks for correcting
perilunar 5mo ago
Don't tax profits (or incomes) at all. Tax land and resource use instead. And treat the knowledge that was used to train the AIs as one of those resources.

overgard 5mo ago

I imagine it'll take a functional legal body to do this IE maybe europe, but I think there should be a legally binding set of metadata you can attach to images to specify that they must not be used for training (with real penalties if companies are caught)

zoom6628 5mo ago
Agree. Should be legally required for all web hosted pictures to be AI poisoned except with explicit verifiable opt out. Same for text. Needs some institution with many geek supporters and or large tools, like Wikipedia or EFF to wage a campaign of scanning the web for materials used without permission and then loading the courts with cases of probable non-consensual usage. May not change billionaire behaviour but perhaps will change consumer behaviour.
noobermin 5mo ago
Of course just like they did with engineering IP china will not respect such a thing.

jpkw 5mo ago

At least for art - I don't think you'll find anyone who actually enjoys art hanging up anything produced by AI on their walls. For these kinds of "customers", they could equally easily frame & hang up a poster of the Mona Lisa. Artists are not at threat, if anything, AI makes original artworks more precious & enjoyable.

yakattak 5mo ago
That's assuming that the only market is stuff people are hanging up. The games industry, one that already takes advantage of its workers, is going to love this to the detriment of really passionate artists who love their craft and industry.
- HDThoreaun 5mo ago
  genAI is going to be great for indie games. Solo productions are much easier to produce and will only get easier as tooling improves. I sort of see this as a spotify moment I guess. A democratizing force that will allow many more people to get paid for their art but with much less job security and often as a second job. Whether that's a good thing is certainly up for debate but I think as a consumer it's probably good for me.
  - bpavuk 5mo ago
    well, GenAI is an ultimate prototyping machine. I keep repeating that so often that autocomplete on my phone already learned it. look at Clair Obscur - this game did use GenAI internally for textures and forgot to clean up in ONE place. they were sorry for that and thanked the community for pointing out. naturally, Twitter and Bluesky went equally mad at Sandfall just for the mere fact of usage, but that didn't disqualify them from The Game Awards, as you can tell from how many awards they got. Expedition 33 nailed music, aesthetics, and narrative, and I am glad that they took a diffusion model for what it is, not for what marketing wants you to believe. although the game itself would benefit from one or two months dedicated exclusively to optimization, it is THE reference of how generative technology can be used - purely internally, to ideate and iterate at the pace of your taste and a bunch of H200s. we are aware of that process detail purely because they slipped in one place and got briefly "owned" by Twitter.

nicbou 5mo ago

No money and no audience. Recognition and gratitude keeps me going. Money pays the bills, but if that was the only concern, I'd still be a software developer. Anonymously feeding the slop machine is nothing like it.

archagon 5mo ago

I’m itching for some sort of no-training license: This content must not be used for training or refining generative AI. If it is, rest assured that if and when the regulatory environment around training data shifts in any country where we have legal standing, we will pursue legal action. Maybe even with a class action element: any lawsuit stemming from a violation of this license shall cover all other violations at the same time.

soundworlds 5mo ago

As someone who simultaneously makes music professionally, and works in IT professionally, it has been really interesting watching GenAI unfold, and the diverging cultures around it. It is almost like the world is splitting into two "societies": 1. One that loves AI + Big Business + very fast Innovation and disruption 2. One that loves Artisanal work + Small Business + slower but more sustainable innovation I personally prefer living in #2, but I can totally see both "societies" continuing to exist and develop in their own ways. Of course there is always the reality that different societies always end up interacting and affecting eachother.

archagon 5mo ago
I am waiting for the online reification of this split with bated breath so that I can fuck off to society #2 and never have to interact with society #1 again.
- AlexCoventry 5mo ago
  Isn't society #1 going to outcompeted #2?
  - archagon 5mo ago
    They can do whatever they want. Their cultural output is completely and utterly uninteresting to me.
  - soundworlds 5mo ago
    In the short term, probably. In the long term, probably not.
- sph 5mo ago
  You are already part of society #2. You are just giving your life, energy and money every day to society #1.
jongjong 5mo ago
I'm not too worried about it because the first segment of society is doomed to be 'good but never great.' AI lacks the ability to identify greatness because it's trained on the output of the average person who also lacks this ability. It's going to create a new elite class of people who have good taste and the masses who have bad taste. Many current elites will end up with the masses. They may retain their wealth on paper, but it will be a cheap, low-quality existence but they will be convinced it's luxury. I think eventually, everyone will get what they want, but not everyone will get what they need.

metrognome 5mo ago

The rhetoric of this comment seems to imply that this is a bad thing, but is it really? If it becomes more difficult to make money through creative endeavors, then that leaves us with fewer reasons to be creative other than for the sake of self-expression... which is what we want, right?

scared_together 5mo ago
If self-expression doesn’t put food on the table, it will become monopolized by those who were already well-fed doing something else.
lofaszvanitt 5mo ago
Sometimes I have the feeling people here are actually braindead or pretending to be or lots of bots around. Anyway. How do you self express yourself without money? And without an audience?
Forgeties79 5mo ago
That only works in a society that doesn’t put such a high premium on productivity as it is defined by how much revenue it generates and vague notions of class (“this is a real job, that is not a real job). We shit on people who work jobs we need/utilize the services of despite the fact that they work as hard as any of us do because we’re too good for that work. The defining factors? We pay them poorly, they get no PTO or parental leave, etc. Because we don’t value them. It’s a vicious feedback loop. We saw this in the 80’s through 2000’s. All parents told their kids was “go to college or you’ll become a mechanic.” Then everyone went to college at all costs and then they were told “well that’s what you get for taking on loans for college. Should’ve been sensible and gone to trade school to become a mechanic.” Of course this is never their kid. Their kid was supposed to college. Everyone else was supposed to go to trade school. I highly recommend everyone read the comic Godshaper. It’s 2 trades (10 or 12 issues can’t remember) and it highlights this dynamic in a way that is impossible to overstate.

Falimonda 5mo ago

This is hyperscale remix culture. AI is an accelerant. Find things that cannot be accelerated!

EvanAnderson 5mo ago

I would assume the publishing industry loves this.

beloch 5mo ago

There seem to be two possibilities: 1. AI can't do some things humans can, and that doesn't change. 2. AI turns into something that can do everything. Humans become unnecessary. We're currently at #1. Google may want to keep you in their AI playpen so all your clicks can be monetized directly to them, but they still need the data humans are creating. They're just not paying for it. In world #1, humans will get less work, but creative and original work will still be valued because AI can't do it. There will, of course, need to be support for all the people striving to create such work while they're gaining the skills to do so. In world #2, humans are getting no work. Neither one of these worlds functions if all the proceeds of work go to a small number of billionaires. Wealth will need to be redistributed so people can live and, if still necessary, do the things AI can't. Regulations need to catch up with what Google is trying to do here. It's currently theft and, even if we reach the point where they no longer need to crawl the web for input to their AI, their wealth will need to be redistributed. Sucking the entirety of human knowledge into a LLM and then profiting off of it without paying the humans who created that knowledge is not a business model that can remain legal for long.

georgeecollins 5mo ago

As someone (like other who have posted) who has made my living my whole life making art/ code, this is completely wrong! What it threatened is the ad based "content" models where you put stuff up for free and sell ads against it. There's lots of ways to make money from any creative endeavor that has a lasting audience. I don't know if that includes talking into your phone or writing a personal journal about productivity hacks. Things you make that are really good: a novel, a game, a short film, a song are still very valuable.

lofaszvanitt 5mo ago

Well people need to wake up and make their own ventures and vote with their wallets.

DarkUranium 4mo ago
Voting with one's wallet pretty much never worked (with few exceptions). The conspiracy theorist in me suspects pushing this is astroturfing by the very aristocracy, to shift blame onto people (same with environment and such, but that one's been proven time and time again).

Eyeland0 5mo ago

"And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity." -William S. Burroughs

pembrook 5mo ago
Yes, the craft to mass production pipeline (democratization) is frustrating for the individual craftsman, as has been true for hundreds of years. AI is simply the assembly line for the digital realm. It takes the trendy products of the rich (custom software, McKinsey PowerPoint decks, etc) and mass produces them in the same style so everyone can afford to buy them at Walmart. For things where the exclusivity WAS the value (like McKinsey consulting PowerPoints), they may fall out of fashion altogether when everyone can have them. Like performative 17th century aristocrat clothing styles. I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing hand-loomed fabrics and bespoke clothing and $5,000 cobbler-pounded leather boots while typing angrily on their keyboards. I also don’t see anyone commissioning artisan chair makers and blacksmiths to create $10,000+ custom furniture to sit on while posting pessimistic comments to HN. Nobody here seems to want to hire a carriage maker to build a custom $400,000 automobile, they seem to all go for mass produced models, betraying the local artisans. The hypocrisy is downright silly. The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans (and ultimately the artisans benefit too given nobody is a true artisan in more than a few things). This ultimately raises living standards for everyone.
- AlecSchueler 5mo ago
  > The hypocrisy is downright silly. > The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans And in this case it's looking more like less than 1% benefiting at the expense of 85%? > I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing ... commissioning ... I would love to order more bespoke goods but mass production has driven most of the makers out of business and that ones that remain I can't afford. You're saying this as though I actually wanted this ugly IKEA closet.
  - 5mo ago

Frieren 5mo ago

> only the large corporations can make money from content. It is an aristocratic tax. Nobility has the right to profit on everything that the peasants produce. The peasants can keep enough to survive, everything else should be extracted. The middle ages didnt happen because people was stupid but because there is a pressure for the money elite to extract as much value as possible. Democracy was designed to control that bad outcome, but the new aristocracy (billionaires, CEOs, etc.) is trying to kill democracy for good. If the average working class Joe wants to have something more than scraps we are going to need to take power back and fix democracy. Google is just a symptom of the disease.

pjmlp 5mo ago

Additionally, the only developers allowed to work as such, are the ones employed at such corporations, everyone else though luck.

tim333 5mo ago

Maybe more both artists and corporations try to make money but AI has tipped the competitive ground in the corporations favour? I've seen the kind of effect a bit with hotels - hotels, booking.com etc, and Google all want to make money but customers tend to google 'hotels in' wherever and Google sells ads against that to the highest bidder which ends up pocketing most of the profits.

oort-cloud9 5mo ago

[dead]

_DeadFred_ 5mo ago

I feel like its the weirdest/most unexpected way to reach a Harrison Bergeron style reality. Everything will flattened to the most plain/mediocre level.

graemep 5mo ago

If you look at the development of copyright law it started to protect the profits of businesses (the Statute of Queen Ann was, at leat in part, intended to compensate members of the Stationers' Company for loss of their monopoly), then maybe improved somewhat, but for the last few decades has been driven by big business lobbying.