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.
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.
I think there’s also a lot of people who haven’t quite realized what side they’re on. A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class and didn’t realize that the average CEO/VC views us roughly the same as the janitors except more expensive and less reliable. If you’re currently working at a stable tech job, it’s easy to focus on the cool things you can do and ignore how hungry those guys are for a massive cut in salaries, how much harder it will be to get an new job, and that trying to start your own company is harder than in recent decades with more established gatekeepers and LLMs being very good at copying a successful product.
New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.
> I think there’s also a lot of people who haven’t quite realized what side they’re on. A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class and didn’t realize that the average CEO/VC views us roughly the same as the janitors except more expensive and less reliable.
For all those coders who claim "coding is the smallest part of s/ware dev", they're in for a rude awakening when they realise that while it may have been a small part, it was the part that lead to high salaries.
After all, anyone who wanted to be a business analyst (i.e. spec a solution and hand it off to someone else for coding) could have had that job ages ago, but they didn't because it pays so poorly (even more poorly when all coders are moving into that role too).
> New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.
Respectfully disagree. New grads entering the workforce now started college in 2022. This was during the post-COVID "Great Resignation" when offers and employee leverage were at their peak and AI wasn't that useful.
Very different from the "use AI or your fired/blackballed" age we live in now.
I think we’re talking about the same thing but slightly differently: I was thinking more narrowly — someone who graduated this year certainly heard that their degree would be in demand, in many cases that’s why they chose it, but they know now that they’re not going to personally experience that favorable job market.
Yes. I’m reminded of the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” trope thinking of the guys I knew who anchored on the high Silicon Valley salaries as their baseline rather than recognizing that those were an extreme outlier. That doesn’t mean people weren’t paid well but it usually wasn’t even, say, successful dentist level much less actually rich.
Exactly what I was thinking when a recent big bank CEO accidentally let his contempt slip out. He referred to mass layoffs as "It's not cost-cutting. It's replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we're putting in." [1]
That "lower-value human capital" isn't janitors - it's a wide array of highly skilled professions including software engineers and many others. Of course the guy who's at the top engaging in nothing but 'unfalsifiable' fuzzy actions, and could be replaced (sans his connections/corruptions) most easily of all, is ultra-high-mega-untouchable infinity value humanity embodied.
I really don't like what big business does to people, on the bottom and the top. The fact somebody could even use the term lower-value human capital without cringing at themselves, let alone to a reporter in public - that's one hell of a bubble this guy lives in. And now we're dumping "AI" into this bubble. WCGW?
Is that so? What do janitors? They clean offices, right? What's in offices? Oh people. If no people are office workers, no offices need cleaning, no need for janitors. I think the economy is more complex than people think. It's not like "just be a plumber" is going help anyone.
Where would information workers go after they get booted out of their market?
Every other market where they could transfer their skills to is threatened by the same hypothetical. And if they jump the collar colour divide, they’d have be limited to the least skilled ones, which includes Janitors.
Now perhaps that would still not threaten the job itself as much, but an increase in supply definitely won’t be good for the wages.
Its probably a situation where you cant choose what you actually want so you choose closest. For me that would be camp 1 but i hate big business because of all the obvious oligopoly market power abuse. Id go back to the 60s antitrust where they were breaking up regional gas station chains if i could because it was more correct than what we are doing. Most of the big guys on nasdaq and s&p need to be broken up imo
man... hacker news is making me sad here. The blatantly obvious stuff that leans left gets upvoted +5 and the blatantly obvious comment made by me directly before this one that leans right is -1. This place used to care more about the correct answer.
I think it was always about the left-leaning answers - while sharing right-leaning concerns, the consensus answer is always more legislation, closer administrative control.
yah, I was on there in the literal 90's and drifted away in the late 2000's. It's still in my rss reader but I never look at it anymore. Other places have a better smattering of news I care about and I never see tech or other things I am interested there first. It probably was going down hill at rob Malda was prepping to leave and then left but I noticed it in the quality of the output and drifted away more than anything. Did it turn into a virtue signalling cess pool along with reddit and the large portions of the web after I left?
Complaining about downvotes used to be uncouth, but whatever. :-)
For what it's worth, I'm pretty "left" - at least within the HN bubble - and I like the cut of your jib. I devoutly wish that the broader "right" cared even one iota about anti-trust / anti-monopoly enforcement.
There are plenty of people who care about the underlying concerns that "anti-trust / anti-monopoly enforcement" is trying to correct, but recognize that the only mechanism ever proposed for addressing those concerns usually involves concentrating ever more power into the hands of an even larger and less accountable monopoly.
The biggest error of the "left" in most of these conversations is treating political institutions as something uniquely well-intentioned and competent, rather than understanding them as just another set of institutions in society, subject to the same incentive structures, biases, and errors as everything else.
A lot of skepticism of political interventions doesn't necessarily come from refusal to acknowledge that there is a problem, but rather from the recognition that the proposed solutions often just represent even worse instances of the same sort of problem. I think a lot of the people who've tended to support political intervention may have operated under the naive assumption that giving the federal government expansive power to intervene into our social and economic affairs could only bring net benefit; hopefully, the behavior of the current administration in the US should be something of a wake-up call.
I agree with (very, very, nearly) everything you say - particularly about the naivety of the "left"'s assumptions about political interventions being necessarily well-intentioned and competent.
On the other hand, skepticism about political intervention over-corrects when it assumes or insists that government action can never be a net benefit. Even the first Trump administration produced one extraordinary success - "Operation Warp Speed" - though, ironically, their faction is too ideologically warped to claim it.
The only point of difference I would identify is that I think a democratic government is more accountable than the monied interests to which it is a necessary counter-balance - and that, historically, the US government has (albeit imperfectly) functioned as such. However, the current US regime is, as you suggest, endeavoring to place itself beyond all democratic accountability, so yeah: I can read the writing on that wall. The bitter irony, of course, is that the political movement which has delivered an historically corrupt and unaccountable executive has been built upon the support of naive skeptics. I hope they will recalibrate their assumptions accordingly.
> The only point of difference I would identify is that I think a democratic government is more accountable than the monied interests to which it is a necessary counter-balance
I'm not entirely sure about that. It makes sense in theory, but in practice, we often see vested interests successfully influence democratic processes to achieve ends that would be more difficult to achieve via pure market dynamics.
We've ended up with the worst of both worlds: institutions that derive their legitimacy from perceived democratic accountability, but with the functional mechanisms of that accountability reduced largely to performative rituals; meanwhile, the incentive structures and motivations that drive their day-to-day behavior derive largely from the influence of special interests or ideological factions.
I think public choice theory is largely correct on this, and many of the policies that are intended to pursue the public interest actually end up working against it.
Indeed. That's the failure mode into which several (at least) western democracies seem to be tipping. Russia, among other states, is all the way down that "performative democracy (only)" road.
Democratic accountability is meant to be the alternative to mass violence. The Demos will, in the end, have their say, and it's far better for everyone that it be through the ballot box than otherwise. Elites forget this, over and over throughout history, to their (or their descendants', if they're lucky) cost. That's the lesson I wish was more remembered, because I don't want to have to live (even if I do) through that kind of time.
> Otherwise, Schmidt wouldn't have drowned in a sea of boos at his commencement speech at UA.
That's assuming both that the audience there was a representative sample of the general population and that ~50% of an audience can't generate a sea of boos. The second one in particular is certainly wrong.
The graduation messages along the lines of well done for studying years but it's redundant because AI can do that might well get booed without any astroturf.
I make my own furniture. I am absolutely not a carpenter. But I hate Ikea furniture - it's made of shitty, flimsy, materials, and its design priorities are all based on cost and ease of transport, not on being great furniture that will last years and be an actual asset to the home.
This is an analogy, obviously. Ikea has been innovative, and it does provide a useful service for people; if you just moved into a new place and need to furnish it as quickly and cheaply as possible, then off to Ikea you go. But it's still shitty furniture.
My furniture doesn't look great, sometimes. My joinery is not perfect. I don't have all the tools I need to do this properly. But the design goals for each are what we need to live our lives. My wife has a stupidly high bed in her office, piled mattresses so she can spread them out if we have many visitors. I made her a bedside table that matches that height. It's a complete one-off; I won't make another that size, and we probably won't need it if we move house.
My point is that we already have this split in other areas of our lives; the Vimes Theory of boots (rich people buy boots that last generations, poor people buy boots every year). Ikea furniture. Buying a mass-produced crockery from a big store, or buying hand-made crockery from a local potter. We're just adding information and code to this split.
I’m not a furniture maker, but I have a rather close connection to the industry. I used to hate ikea furniture. In fact I hated almost all modern furniture that mass market, that wasn’t high end. I was a huge proponent of vintage furniture ( and still am), but I have really come around on ikea. They sure still make some crap, but they also make some genuinely innovative pieces that can last if you treat them with a basic level of care. I’d specifically call out / praise a few of their beds with built in drawer solutions. A few good desks too. They also have other mostly solid wood products too. It really depends. Just my $0.02.
Agreed. I was a carpenter for a long time and have built everything from completely disposable structures to things that ended up in Design Within Reach.
I think Ikea is great. Sure, the cheaper stuff consists of veneered particle board at best. But they (at least used to) use thicker veneers, often include relatively high quality hardware, and make some products that are just completely solid (stainless kitchen gear, simple but serviceable pine furniture, standing desks, some bedding).
What gets to me are places like West Elm and similar companies. Mid-Century design, but it's the same veneered particle board as the much cheaper Ikea stuff, and costs far more.
Many of Ikea's wood (wood-like?) products are pretty flimsy, designed to be built once and never moved or taken apart. (cough - all cupboards, most cabinets - cough)
But somewhat ironically their steel kitchenware is competitive with catering equipment. It may not be as well designed for maximum functionality and storage packing efficiency, but costs about the same or even less than comparable Vogue gear. Over the years I've spotted an increasing number of street food vendors using Ikea bowls and trays, so the price and availability advantage appears to be real.
Billy bookshelves seem pretty good even though they are veneered board of some kind. I have several and they have lasted many years (eve ones bought second hand) and moves. Not the best, but not terrible and great value for money.
The cubical storage units are pretty solid and practical.
On the other hand the IKEA wardrobe I have is falling to pieces.
> What gets to me are places like West Elm and similar companies. Mid-Century design, but it's the same veneered particle board as the much cheaper Ikea stuff, and costs far more.
Somewhat similar to what I was thinking. In the UK John Lewis sell (or used to) sell bookshelves very similar to a Billy (in construction and appearance depending on the veneer) at three times the price.
Agree completely. As I said, Ikea provide a valuable service. And I'm sure that for some pieces, quality is compatible with the core design values of cost and transportability.
And, to extend the analogy, I'm sure Google's AI results will be perfectly serviceable for some people in some situations.
But for my wife's odd, non-standard, situation I had to build it myself. And for some people's odd, non-standard, situation they'll need to construct (or find) a bespoke information service that matches their needs. That will probably cost them more and the joinery won't be as neat.
I want to buy you a CMOT Dibbler Sausage for the Vimes reference. Perfect metaphor for this situation. His point was that it was the cheap boots that keep people poor, so that makes me think artist and artisan patronage will be an even bigger thing in years to come.
The metaphor may not hold up well in practice, but as counterexamples, I've had a pair of motorcycle boots since the late 80s that have never needed any maintenance beyond some saddle soap, and my grandfather's fountain pen from the 1920s just turned 100 and still writes fine. I put a new nib in it about 15 years ago or so.
A lot of their furniture now has warnings that it must be secured to the wall - for that very reason. On their (Norwegian) website, this starts with furniture around 100cm tall, especially if it is talland thin or sits on legs.
I guess the change (and recalls) are a result of lawsuits from that same dresser.
The really rich people that I know of drive 10-year-old beaten-up Land Rovers, though.
I think there's a nouveau-riche slice of folks who buy "luxury" cars thinking that they confer status. There are brands like this in every industry, that adopt all the pointers of "luxury" except actual quality.
There was a study sometime back that suggested most American millionaires live in homes of modest or at least unostentatious size and drive used cars of American make. These days it'd probably be of Japanese make, as Toyotas and Nissans are relatively cheap and last forever. Having a lot of money and showing the world that you have a lot of money are completely different goals. You'll be flat broke if you join an MLM with 99.5% certainty, but if you're a good enough salesperson they'll loan out a Mercedes or something to drive around so you can show off how rich the plan made you and "edify your upline". You're on the hook for fuel and maintenance, though.
Maybe it's the Scots-Irish in him, but my father was always one to go for the luxury stuff, but still seek out the good quality stuff at as good a price as he can manage and fix it up if it were broken. He knows how to keep a Cadillac Eldorado on the road for 20 years or more, so of course he's going to spring for the fancy if a used one turns up at a good price. In the 80s he bought a small mansion that was in a quasi-dilapidated state but had been standing since the opening years of the 20th century. We renovated it inside and out, and today it's on the National Register of Historic Places (though my parents no longer live there).
> still seek out the good quality stuff at as good a price as he can manage and fix it up if it were broken.
I think that's a nice story to highlight, being able to do things well and preserving that knowledge
While there can be benefits for mass producing things, what actually is produced is going to be limited by what techniques are conducive to automation. So the techniques that are hard to automate are lost from the market of provided goods and then human capital for it also gets lost (can't think of any concrete examples off the top of my head, but maybe the techniques for some elements of clothing that are now only found in couture/custom pieces). Another related idea is how there are much fewer color variations in manufactured goods now, simply because it simplifies the mass manufacturing process.
> can't think of any concrete examples off the top of my head, but maybe the techniques for some elements of clothing that are now only found in couture/custom pieces
Maybe how clothes used to come with a decent margin on the hems so you could alter them, but now they don't?
I don't have direct experience with Hondas, but I'm sure they're fantastic. My mom had a Nissan in the late 90s that she got with 100,000 miles on it and put another 100,000 miles on it before getting rid of it.
My admiration of Honda and Toyota comes from their hybrid offerings, probably the most practical kind of car to get.
EVs have the charging requirement, so it’s a lifestyle / home setup adjustment. Plus, other trade-offs like being way heavier due to the battery, and higher risk of being totaled if the battery pack is even slightly damaged.
Slight aside: I only recently learned how much easier it is to total an EV. A small accident can be fine for a gas car, but for an EV, if it does anything to the battery, and requires replacing the battery or going deep inside to try and figure out what’s wrong with it, it’s just not worth it anymore, and gets declared totaled by the insurance company. Not great! Felt it was worth including in my expected cost calculation for whether or not to get an EV.
And regular cars haven’t gotten MPG improvements in years.
So I have a good impression of the hybrid technologies they’ve developed!
Though their electrification strategy seems completely different.
Toyota/Lexus I think are in the hybrid lineup still. Whereas Honda went full electrification and shut down a lot of production so as to refit their factories. I believe one of the reasons that Honda sales plummeted recently, since they had just ramped down production.
Maybe that technology will be lost someday, I wonder how well-documented it is and if it’d be easy to ramp back up
I see this in my village. There is a good mix of private and social housing. The private houses tend to have modest cars whereas the social houses have something flash.
Ikea has long existed before the Internet and over capitalization.
I have several Ikea pieces in my home, and I've had some for over a decade. If you build Ikea stuff properly, are selective in what you purchase, and use wood glue when constructing, then it lasts as long as anything else really.
Their flat packed designs are actually innovative. People can outfit an entire room by using a Honda Fit to transport.
Agree completely, as I said their design priorities are cost and transportability, and they provide a valuable service. Mostly I hate the shitty laminated chipboard half their stuff is made from. If you replaced that with actual wood, and some of the weird aluminium pegs with actual dowels or joinery, it'd be fine. But that's kinda beside the point; if you did that it would be more expensive and less easily transported, and therefore wouldn't fit their priorities.
And, of course, their bedside cabinets are the wrong size for my wife's bed, so I'd have to make one anyway.
And this is just an analogy; if you like Ikea-style Google Search, then great for you. I pay for Kagi because that Ikea-style Google Search doesn't work for me.
Do you think that AI could actually free up time in your life in other areas, so that you could spend more time doing the things you love like making furniture? Or maybe help you directly in your furniture-making, by perhaps helping you to research things?
Please don't misunderstand: my point is not "AI is good."
It is problematic in many ways. My point is that I think the "AI versus actually doing cool human-crafted stuff" split is... a misguided, maybe even harmful, mental model of a more complicated reality.
That's the promise of every new technology. Although there's been massive progress over the past 50+ years, the amount of free time that people have has actually gone DOWN (https://clockify.me/working-hours)..."I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes"...we'll see
> Do you think that AI could actually free up time in your life in other areas, so that you could spend more time doing the things you love.
Personally, I don’t believe that would be the case. Jevon’s paradox mixed with the natural tendency to exploit others.
One could argue that technology -in general- didn’t really save people time by itself, it’s regulation - a social construct, and I am counting both cultural and legal enforcement of them as well- that did. Just look at how workers in countries without your European-style protections fare. Wikipedia’s article on the Chinese 996 [1] has a nice map for deaths due to long working hours by country, notice the dominant colours for each quadrant of this (projected) globe.
Pre industrialised societies’ labourers were limited by daylight and travel distance. The modern availability and abundance of artificial lighting, mechanised transportation, and telecommunication means their grand kids are expected to -and often do- toil every waking moment.
What time is AI going to free up for me? Can AI go to the grocery store for me, do my laundry, do my dishes? Can it let me clock out early? The spoils of AI do not go to individuals
It's not AI, but there's Doordash and Rinse if that's what you're trying to optimize for. The robots will be coming out, soon enough, and then we're all in trouble though.
I think in a different society this could have been the case (possibly, assuming the hype is somewhat true).
But the way society is structured now? We still live in feudalism, just uplifted to modern levels of ”comfort” (if you take of your western glasses and look at the whole world. There are still people living in medieval conditions today in some places in the world).
The way it’s going it’s only going to make rich people richer, and give them more power to control this system and perpetuate it. I don’t see that drastically changing anytime soon, unless we do something about it on a societal level.
Direct consequence of industrial revolution was an INCREASE in workload. People worked MORE, not less. It required organization, protests, political pressure and even some bloodshed to get 8 hrs workday.
People that push for AI are not interested in making your life better.
No, because the machine consumes all of your time that it can take without literally killing you. If you manage to free some time somewhere, the machine will adapt and eat it up. We have so-called developed countries talking about raising the retirement age and cutting holidays, that's the "future" we are living in.
I don’t disagree with your overall point but developed countries are raising their retirement ages because they’re trying to stave off pension crises. It’s the surprising alternative to taxing corporations and the ultra-wealthy appropriately.
> But I hate Ikea furniture - it's made of shitty, flimsy, materials, and its design priorities are all based on cost and ease of transport, not on being great furniture that will last years and be an actual asset to the home.
I have seen/heard this a lot lately, but all the Ikea furniture I have ever had has been great. Among others, had a chair that was good for like 11 years lol
I think this is actually a counter-example of what you think it is.
Chairs should last generations. A chair lasting 11 years is not exemplary. A chair falling apart after a few years should be the exception, and a bad thing at that.
Again, Vimes Theory: rich folks inherit furniture that their grandparents bought, and maybe need to get it re-upholstered once in their lifetime. Poor folks have to pay for new furniture every few years because it falls apart.
My parents bought some really nice modern furniture when they married in the early 1960s. 5 houses and 60 years later (and a few re-upholsterings), it still looks and works as beautifully as ever. My brother will probably inherit it in a few years, then his kids; it will likely get another 60 years at least.
One of my friends has a kitchen table her great grandmother owned.
Neither of us (or our parents) are rich, but good, well made furniture used to be an investment. Now most furniture is disposable.
> Chairs should last generations. A chair lasting 11 years is not exemplary. A chair falling apart after a few years should be the exception, and a bad thing at that.
IDK, this feels to me more like an aspiration or desire about what furniture quality should generally be, and not really a description of what most furniture is actually like.
> rich folks inherit furniture that their grandparents bought, and maybe need to get it re-upholstered once in their lifetime.
I get that this is beside the point, but IDK why anyone would want their grandparents' furniture, aside from maybe a few choice really nice, antique-ish things. If I was "rich", I would rather buy my own furniture for the most part...
Stuff that has lasted two generation will be antique-ish (if not actually antique) and usually nice. It will have the quality it should, rather than the quality most furniture has.
All my grandparents' furniture is properly jointed and made of good wood.
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.
I don't see that at all. I see spammers and propagandists love LLMs because they can use it to accomplish their goals at the expense of the rest of us. I see AI companies marketing their products hard but in ways that seem self-defeating. Seems obvious but ads shouldn't make people hate the product and the AI folks don't seem to understand this. I see lots more effort to find artisanal things because people understand how much spammy stuff is being made. So I see basically an attack on the media ecosystem and people adapting with various levels of success to those attacks. I also see it costing the platforms as now they have extra effort and expense to keep their value for their users. Nobody wants to read a bunch of LLM generated slop on the social feed.
But big businesses suck at innovation so much that their primary form of innovation is through acquiring small businesses. But that is a big benefit for #2 as we need innovations to get to a sustainable system.
The problem is that it is increasingly difficult to survive as a small business (due to constantly increasing compliance/regulatory/legal burdens), so it makes sense to ‘sell out’ as soon as possible (or just give up early). The rate of small businesses growing into large ones has been decreasing for at least 20 years.
This is tech we are talking about. There are very little, if any, regulatory burdens in place here.
The only things that DO hurt SMBs across the board are things like paying for private health insurance and retirement plans. Two core things every worker needs but only massive corporations can truly provide.
It's why things like medicare for all and universal childcare are so popular among workers, also why things like corporate welfare are so disgusting.
>"There are very little, if any, regulatory burdens in place here."
Speaking as someone who works in a small company that designs and manufactures embedded devices, I can tell you that many of the 'minor' regulations which are not supposed to burden small businesses actually do. My (single) biggest annoyance is the conflict minerals reporting requirements which were supposed to apply to very large companies, but have been 'passed down' to smaller suppliers (as anyone with half a brain would have expected). There are many other KYC, CBP, and other regulations which have substantial impacts as well.
The only innovation needed to be sustainable is to recognize that capitalism is not sustainable, and never can be. But that's not a profitable innovation, so it never gets pursued.
That's not at all a benefit for #2—when small businesses that are thriving and making Society #2 better get bought up by big businesses, they cease to be part of Society #2. In many cases, the innovative things they were doing simply disappear, as the big business that bought them didn't want to use it, they just wanted to kill it.
"Big business," in the sense it exists today, is itself a detriment to our society as a whole, and can only exist because of the utter destruction of antitrust that happened under Reagan. Without that, much more of our current society would look like #2, with or without LLMs.
I too am a musician and a, well, was a, tech person. I’m completely in the #2 camp. I enjoy AI music, AI art, but I enjoy originality more.
That said, I also think there’s an element of bullshit in the room where an LLM will look like it’s doing something profound but ultimately isn’t, or doesn’t work, or has no actual proof. This “hallucination zone”. They can still do great things but they need a solid hand holding to not get it wrong 20% of the time.
As an early web guy who gets off on tech and problem solving I have long hated the industry with a passion as I see it as a fundamental brain drain for society full of bullshit jobs and bullshit people. Including of course myself. I should welcome the automation and yet my heart feels ripped out as the emperor has been laid bare with 20 odd years going up in smoke as vultures pick at the corpses of the old guard.
Most people I interact with IRL are a combo. AI + fast innovation = more small businesses. It's just an effective tool to handle other things and work on your actual job- which people have been paying a multitude of (increasingly SAAS) companies for for awhile now.
Now you can open a machine shop, write custom software to more easily track customers, orders, operations, set up a website and social media giving you more time to focus on making the parts. Heck, even using AI to track down hard to find supplies instead of spending multiple hours googling and calling people (these are real pain points).
Category 1 will ensure that, if either category prefers to continue to exist, we may very likely need to find another planet to keep doing what we're doing. Category 2 on it's own seems much less likely to wreck life-support on our current planet.
I can see the initial appeal, but right now it would seem that those people that dig the fast innovation and disruption the most are clueless on how easy it is to wreck this system by accident. Remember how CFK's were once considered a wonderful invention, as refrigerators no longer needed to be the size of a building filled with highly volatile gas. A rather unfortunate side-effect turned out to be the difficulty of getting the particles out of the atmosphere again. By the time it became apparent that this buildup up there would have rather drastic consequences for life down here, products containing CFK's were already massproduced and life without these products was unimaginable.
Apart from all the obvious, and all the known ways in which Big Tech keeps pushing towards climate conditions excluding organic, mammalian lifeforms, it no longer seems very far fetched that somebody will accidentally accellerate us to that point. As the moving fast part is largely a tactic to avoid accountability for the breaking things part, the person doing the breaking may be just as unaware of the danger that has been created, as the people they've razzle-dazzled, that will eventually realize something has been broken somewhere along the way... and a quick look at advertisements, American style, teaches us how even unnecessarily dangerous practices (like adding lead to just about everything, instead of figuring out how to do the same stuff without it) can be sold for ages and ages, long after people have started to realise the danger that has been introduced.
No matter how fast you move and how much you break, turning another planet into a place where people could live (not even talking about the ability to indulge in cultivating societies) is something Big Tech is unable to achieve over the next couple of years, and it remains to be seen if it will be able to reach a stage where they could make that happen with some certainty. Meanwhile, only a decade or two ago, Big Tech did actually have enough proven technology, insight and expertise that would have sufficed to nudge living conditions on Earth back within desireable margins. A lot of the data may have been poisoned, knowledge and tech has been lost, but the chances of achieving that seem well within Big Tech's grasp - were it not for the apparent inability of certain parties to refrain from moving fast as they're breaking stuff.
Long before anyone is actually in any position to start terraforming on Mars, much of what Big Tech is actually capable of doing reliably now, will no longer be feasible nor within their grasp.
Apologies if I'm ranting, but no, I can't see both 'societies' continuing to exist and develop in their own ways. If group 1 could put the disruption on hold while fixing and rebuilding what is needed to keep our habitat fit for our species, and if some kind of safety mechanism would be invented to ensure that whatever they might accidentally break next, it will not be life itself,... only then could I easily enjoy and appreciate both ways of life.
(1) will continue to happen because of human behavior and the oligarchy. The oligarchy would love to forget that the time you could call a customer support representative that was native in your language, lived in your country, and actually knew things, more than the computer told them, actually existed. Human behavior forgets it because the Internet and software has added so much "convenience" to life and there's all these new shiny things everywhere.
Way back, finding music wasn't a problem. You went to the store. You talked to people. You didn't need to wait for weeks to get basic doctor's appointments. You could get customer support via an easy phone call. You could drive around and find things just fine.
The U.S. government and people have been more than happy to dehumanize people and themselves by handing over their lifestyles to corporations.
> very fast Innovation and disruption
I don't think people are innovating. They're certainly disrupting in destructive ways. But other than things like improvements in health care and safety in cars, how have things actually and concretely gotten better through all this so-called innovation that happens?
Calling #2 more sustainable has no basis in reality, it's just a feeling. It's like saying that clothing before the loom or farming before the tractor were "more sustainable". No, it isn't, it just appeals to yeoman farmer instincts that somehow technology=bad when it's what powers (and sustains) our modern world of 8 billion people.
#1 may well put #2 out of a living but that isn't the same as stealing and doesn't (at least in and of itself) make it unsustainable. The fact that models were trained on scraped content isn't a matter of technical necessity but rather the path of least resistance (lowest cost in this case). Synthetic data is increasingly used for reasons of quantity, quality, and various technical considerations.
All of the major players in AI currently, literally stole to build their models. There isn’t one out there that hasn’t. So yes, it is the same as stealing because they were LITERALLY, in the literal sense, stealing.
Well, pirated. Piracy and stealing aren't the same thing.
Regardless, I acknowledged the general issue. However I pointed out that doing so was not a technical necessity. If you base your worldview or actions around X implying Y but then it turns out that actually Y was merely a matter of convenience you're probably going to arrive at a wrong conclusion.
There's also the issue where you're emphatically calling it stealing without providing a clear criteria. The legal system as a whole has yet to conclusively resolve the various piracy accusations. The legality of consuming publicly available content remains quite controversial.
It absolutely is a technical necessity. You could build a model from scratch today without doing the same thing. And every model attempting to train on AI generated output degrades into nonsense almost immediately.
There’s a reason Reddit is making millions of dollars letting these companies mine their human generated content. You think OpenAI or anyone else would pay for that if they could just cyclically train on AI generated content???
I said nothing about that. Good synthetic data does not (typically) involve ML algorithms. Although that might be changing.
I'll politely suggest that you go read the literature before engaging further.
Reddit, Twitter, and similar are valuable because the data covers current events. Their content makes up a reasonably comprehensive timeline of the world at large. You don't need that to train a barebones functional model but it's certainly useful in order to train a knowledgeable one. Regardless, if they're charging for access it clearly isn't piracy so it doesn't seem like your original objection would hold any water in that case.
> I'll politely suggest that you go read the literature before engaging further.
Which commercial AI vendor has not stolen any content when creating their models? I’ll wait.
Which commercial AI vendor has created their models exclusively training on datasets created and created by other AI?
> Regardless, if they're charging for access it clearly isn't piracy so it doesn't seem like your original objection would hold any water in that case.
Given that they were previously violating the site’s terms of service when scraping the content: yes, they were absolutely stealing.
It's sustainable in the literal sense, I.E. a tailor can simply tailor forever without needing to constantly worry about keeping up with new tools or technologies, or needing to upgrade or change their methodology constantly.
The tech world is obsessed with moving fast and breaking things, and you can't just do the same thing forever and expect it to always work.
Think about how much food we throw away in the developed and developing worlds. How often we buy new clothing when we could mend old clothing. How often we ask for more when we could do with less. How often we want to eat at a restaurant when we could make leftovers. How often we want something sweet when we could just eat something bland. How often we heat and cool our homes when we could wear more or less clothing.
It turns out that while these are all truisms, nobody wants to fix them. Developed countries are okay passing pigovian taxes, to a limited extent, to help fix these problems. Developing countries are even less interested in fixing these problems. It turns out that austerity is incredibly unpopular. Everyone wants to tell other people not to do the things they don't like but nobody wants to listen to what other people tell them not to do.
Just a reminder that Europe colonized Asia, Africa, and the Americas in the search for spices. Later on the interest changed to tea. Literally the only thing that Europe wanted was better tasting food and drink (initially at least.) By the time the potato had become widespread, they could have had enough calories to feed the continent, and yet the desire for flavor is what lead to untold misery for hundreds of years for millions of people.
We need to be realistic about what works and what doesn't. Austerity never wins.
“More sustainable” than burning hydrocarbons to produce chatbot tokens. Humanity could sustain itself on those resources much longer if we were more careful with them. The very definition of sustainability.
The bigger issue is that the AI we currently have available has been produced by setting a giant pile of money on fire with no real plan for ever earning it back. And that is not sustainable because at some point the checks dry up. We have zero idea what the economics of unsubsidized inference are because we still don't actually know how much money the frontier labs are currently losing.
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.
My definition of bad taste is; will be derivative. These people will consume variants of the same thing over and over, not realizing it to be the case. They will be narrow minded and predictable. They will be afraid of any other ideas which doesn't fit the acceptable pattern of their tribe.
This is why I advocate for people to spend some time outside in nature and try to do something different once in a while because it's so easy to get stuck in a really small bubble. Especially when you exist in an entirely man-made, soon-to-be fully AI-controlled environment. You may lose your ability to have novel thoughts.
Some people are already there but the range of thoughts seems to be narrowing.
My biggest fear is being caught up in such group for financial reasons and trying to navigate some kind of linguistic and conceptual minefield everyday. I already encountered a situation like that twice in my career. Very tense environment. Feels like you're in a brainwashing cult and have to pretend to be one of them; it's really hard to pretend to be ignorant of certain kinds of information when you don't know what the full range of forbidden ideas is. Saying the wrong things got me fired both times; differences in our mental conditioning created very subtle tension/discomfort between me and management.
They will tolerate people who are 'running a simpler program' than themselves but they will absolutely not tolerate someone with a broader programming. Hence you have to pretend to be narrow-minded which is hard to maintain. This is why I like remote work.
That's basically what Marx & co. have been talking about. Just that there are no more aristocrats, bourgeois, proletariat.
Today there's just the ultra-rich in control of the government, media and now the machines, and then there's the 98% of us, that want dignity, a decent life, a little freedom.
It's high time we figure out our place in this ecosystem, and that there is a lot more of us "normal people". Yet, the vast majority still live in the "social ladder" utopia. The temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The American dream.
However else you feel, AI is a force multiplier, and that can also REALLY benefit "Artisanal work + Small Business"
I feel like the "one person app creator" business is so much more viable than it has been since Web 1.0
Five years ago, to run your own solo business in this space, you had to know most of the following: taxes, legal, backend, frontend, devops, iOS dev, Android dev, and marketing and then pay through the nose for most of the ones you didn't. AI helps to paper over a LOT of those gaps... and you can spend more time doing the shit that matters to your business.
You also needed time and lots of it, which is perhaps easy to come by if you're a trust fund baby or independently wealthy and don't have to work for a living but if you have a job and/or family is in extremely short supply
I used to run an online community on the side and I spent SO MUCH TIME doing IT/legal/finance drudgework that could have been spent, you know, engaging with the community and actually improving the product... that "artisinal work" for a "small business" you think you love.
There are of course major major problems with AI, like environmental concerns and others, but dichotomies like yours are not the way forward. At least not a good way forward.
> However else you feel, AI is a force multiplier, and that can also REALLY benefit "Artisanal work + Small Business"
> Five years ago, to run your own solo business in this space, you had to know most of the following: taxes, legal, backend, frontend, devops, iOS dev, Android dev, and marketing and then pay through the nose for most of the ones you didn't. AI helps to paper over a LOT of those gaps... and you can spend more time doing the shit that matters to your business.
How is running a business in the way you've just described artisanal? You're basically saying we should be outsourcing all of these things to AIs, which is simply not artisanal.
You'll surely understand if you ever take the plunge and run your own business.
You're going to have to spend quite a bit of time and/or money doing things unrelated to the actual product and CX.
Taxes, marketing, etc. The more you can streamline those other bits, the more time and energy you can spend actually improving the thing you are offering.
Again, maybe it's the kind of thing where you need to run a business, or at least talk to a business owner to understand.
As I understand it, we used to have the concept of "hiring workers" or "contracting for services".
The benefit of this was that when Internal Revenue called and said in lieu of a tax return, you sent a takeaway menu covered in pornographic drawings, you could reach out to the person you paid and expect them to take accountability.
Instead, we're getting :sparkles: You're absolutely right! I shouldn't have sent the taxman the Goatse picture, would you like me to try something else? :sparkles:
I miss when I would receive and email or something that I can easily tell that whomever wrote it is a clueless idiot. Now I have to filter the prose before reaching the same conclusion.
Those concepts still exist and I'd highly recommend them when possible.
We also had, and still have, concepts called "time" and "money" and perhaps you've heard that they're finite and often in short supply.
Particularly when "bootstrapping," another concept you can consider. This is when you start small and self-fund your own business. Seems pretty relevant because we're talking about small and artisanal businesses.
...
...wait, I get it. This is HN. All you people understand is venture capital funded shit. In that case, yeah. Build your prototype, do whatever you have to do to get $100M funding, hire 50 people, rent some offices, hire those workers and contract those services and burn $20M a month before you make your first sale. OK. Yeah. That's the only way. Don't forget the Aeron chairs and $500 stealth-wealth hoodies or whatever.
"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
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.
That is a very poor comparison. Firstly, you're ignoring that behind the mass manufactured stuff, there's a lot of abused labour. People do protest that. Because of how money works, it's also impossible to avoid it.
Second, machinery that automated work isn't remotely the same. Engineers have built and refined the machines without having to go and inspect every new work that has been created by artisans each time. Creative people who have practiced the art of designing clothes and shoes stitch together and build prototypes. Entire machinery is built as an independent path away from how artisans build furniture.
There is a parallel though for how LLMs, in order to improve, gobble up all new work produced by people and never give attribution back. We see it when someone does a unique physical product design and starts selling it only for some 2 bit shop elsewhere to try and copy and sell a cheap knockoff version. The original person does all the hard work of prototyping and testing and the 2 bit shop which has access to more machinery resources buys a couple, copies it with less quality, makes a few changes, sells it, and probably outspends the original person on ad revenue too.
No, GenAI doesn't produce the exact same work as what they ingest. But style does get reproduced. And style is such a difficult problem to solve. Studio Ghibli didn't craft its signature style by accident. People prototyped and worked hard on how to design it, how to solve the problems unique to the design, created rules for it, and then painstakingly made the stories that were best told through that style. Only for the AI companies to pop out some bastardized version of it every time someone says "make my picture anime". No attribution given. No love. No homage. Just an encouragement for hordes of people to claim how easy it is without ever understanding the thought that actually went into it.
So no. It's not hypocrisy. It's recognition of these machines being information and creative laundering factories. They take and take and never give back any value that they could never create or improve on on their own. Those last words being key
The thesis of the person you're replying to seems to be that this is just another in the long line of mechanized crafts, and that it's hypocritical not to be equally anti-loom as anti LLM, for example. At least that's how I interpreted it.
While reading your rebuttal I was able to substitute LLM with loom and arrive at the same conclusions, mourning the loss of the artisan, copying their product for cheaper, etc. So you failed to draw the distinction that is necessary to rebut their point.
The only point you made that seemed on point to me was the first one, "it's not hypocrisy because people do protest looms", which I didn't find convincing.
I never thought I’d see the day when the open source “information wants to be free” crowd is complaining about intellectual property and “stylistic inspiration sources.”
The courts have already ruled on this. Creative work that is inspired by (ie. an amalgamation of) other works is not a copy. It’s how ALL creative work is generated by humans too. When enough humans get inspired/rip-off something we just legitimize it and call it a "genre."
The truth is most of the work done in the world is duplicative and not novel. LLMs are a giant compression model on that duplicative work, and if your job is to create charts and buttons out of react components for the 7,000,000th time, it turns out it’s better that AI automate that and free you up to focus on higher value tasks for humanity. Just as mass production eliminated duplicative artisanal work that made pretty much everything scarce and only available to the elite.
Did the rich elite lose some of the eccentric uniqueness in their world, and some of their previous performative signaling mechanisms (ie. putting 4 layers of hand carved crown molding in a ceiling differently than the last guy, or using $400k/yr engineers to create slightly different border radius buttons in each app)? Yes, but it comes at the benefit of the global masses who now can attain everything previously only available to elites via the AI mass production.
I loved visiting Versailles. Yet, I would never want to go back and live in that time, because there's a 99.99999% chance you aren't the guy living in it, and instead are the one who has 4 generations of your family enslaved to carve tiny sculptures into hand railings and live off gruel in a freezing cold hut while doing it. My lame, non-artisanal 2000s mass produced home is vastly superior to conditions that 99.99999% of people in the 1600s lived in.
> I never thought I’d see the day when the open source “information wants to be free” crowd is complaining about intellectual property and “stylistic inspiration sources.”
The difference is twofold: firstly people are intrinsically driven to be creative, that even with inspiration taken there's a desire to create something fresh. As you say, not just mechanical regurgitations of pre-revolutionary French style.
Secondly, "the courts have already ruled in this?" Have they? Are we not doing the IP thing anymore? Does that go for you and I and everyone else, or only for a handful of billion dollar companies?
There have been a million IP disputes over creative/artistic outputs going back hundreds of years. This is extremely well-tread territory. We don't need to re-invent IP law.
As much as people would like to completely own and charge rents on the idea of "Serif text on a black background with gradients," this is not a good outcome for society and we've already fought this battle and come to a good solution a long time ago. Creativity has flourished and is still flourishing because of it.
Do you think software patent trolls filing lawsuits on protected IP like "Phone application with informational dashboard" are good now because you hate and fear AI so much? Becoming pro-patent troll and pro-DRM would be a wild turn for the HN userbase, but seems to be what you're suggesting.
> Do you think software patent trolls filing lawsuits on protected IP like "Phone application with informational dashboard" are good now because you hate and fear AI so much? Becoming pro-patent troll and pro-DRM would be a wild turn for the HN userbase, but seems to be what you're suggesting.
Could you quote where I'm suggesting that? It seems like you're putting words in my mouth here and it makes discussion feel quite unpalatable.
> There have been a million IP disputes over creative/artistic outputs going back hundreds of years.
Yes and that's why I'm not allowed to torrent thousands of books to learn a particular style of painting or writing or whatever. I'm not allowed to scrape the whole Spotify library to help my music studies. But for these companies it's accepted practice. Odd
the debates is rich= bad, poor = good. The idea that they are all mediocre isn't popular on the left since it's a left dogma (and the reason why either the right always win or the left always loose).
This isn't only mass-produced products replacing bespoke products, it's also the strip-mining of attribution.
A better analogy is if we were to abolish trademark protection completely; anyone can go create a Nike knockoff, complete with the branding, and sell them legally.
This is what the blog post under discussion is complaining about - your labour will be laundered through the machine, and presented to an end-user with the end-user having never heard of you.
> This is what the blog post under discussion is complaining about - your labour will be laundered through the machine, and presented to an end-user with the end-user having never heard of you.
Isn't that what organizations do in general? A person grows your food and installed the plumbing in your house and wrote a component of the web browser you're using. Do you know their names?
> Isn't that what organizations do in general? A person grows your food and installed the plumbing in your house and wrote a component of the web browser you're using.
The person growing the food I get or the plumber installing a toilet never asked for attribution because it wasn't relevant to their pay.
> Do you know their names?
As a matter of fact, for things that require attribution, I do know their names. You do too!
Like the author of this blog post - his name is right there on the site.
Now, you may say "But I'm fine with laundering attribution", but that is no different from claiming that trademark law should be effectively nullified because you don't wear trademarked clothing.
> The person growing the food I get or the plumber installing a toilet never asked for attribution because it wasn't relevant to their pay.
But it is though. If they do a good job then you could have customers wanting the same one again. You go to the grocery store and there is just a bin full of undifferentiated produce. Some days they're juicier than others. They came from different farms. But they don't even tell you when they switch from one to another, so how is a farmer who is doing a better job supposed to get more business or command higher prices?
> As a matter of fact, for things that require attribution, I do know their names. You do too!
Blogs include the author's name because they want to, not because they're required to. There are plenty of organizational ones that are published only in the name of the organization.
The thing that allows attribution to happen is the absence of a middle man. When you go to the farm shop at the farm itself then you get told the name of the family whose farm it is, but not when you go to Walmart. When you hire someone to build a walkway you see their face and learn their name; when the government hires them to build a sidewalk on your behalf they become a faceless abstraction.
> If they do a good job then you could have customers wanting the same one again. You go to the grocery store and there is just a bin full of undifferentiated produce. Some days they're juicier than others. They came from different farms. But they don't even tell you when they switch from one to another, so how is a farmer who is doing a better job supposed to get more business or command higher prices?
As far as I can see from the text above, you feel it should be relevant to their pay, but nothing you say makes me think that it currently is relevant to their pay.
What you think should be happening is not my point; I am only saying that it isn't happening.
> Blogs include the author's name because they want to, not because they're required to.
But that's my point! You appear to agree that the labour supplier in this specific case wants attribution, and yet you are arguing that they should not get it?
> As far as I can see from the text above, you feel it should be relevant to their pay, but nothing you say makes me think that it currently is relevant to their pay.
No, it currently is relevant to their pay. They would be paid a different amount if the quality of their product was attributable by the customer to the specific producer. It affects how many customers/sales they get.
> You appear to agree that the labour supplier in this specific case wants attribution, and yet you are arguing that they should not get it?
But how is that any different than any other case? If the farmer wants attribution, that doesn't mean Walmart is giving it to them.
The thing that isn't currently happening is the stores attributing the source of their produce. It's obviously not a hypothetical that customers have preferences between different sources when they're actually provided with that information, or those preferences affect the sales of each supplier.
> It's obviously not a hypothetical that customers have preferences between different sources when they're actually provided with that information, or those preferences affect the sales of each supplier.
I suppose we have to agree to disagree: I see no evidence of the specific claim of yours that customers have a preference for specific individuals picking fruit (or whatever).
A specific brand? Sure. A specific niche (free-range, whatever), sure. A specific individuals labour? Yeah, I'd need to see some evidence for that!
Comparing GenAI to any previous "disruptions" (and these also had very negative consequences for large swaths of people, even if you consider them net positive) only shows ignorance of the person making a comparison.
So called ad hominem is perfectly reasonable argument type, not personal attack. Please, don't be such a snowflake. Saying that someone is ignorant of how history really unfolded, and therefore their claims not only on how history went, but also how the future will look like, are unsound, is very rational thing to do. Also, you cannot make logical rebuttals of ideas, as logic is concerned with relationship inside formal systems, and ideas worth considering are anything but.
You, and people like you, make analogies between current trends regarding AI and historical processes related to different inventions that were supposed to act as milestones technological progress, or even progress in general. Problem is that, primo, historical events are unique, and all historiosophical attempts so far were futile, therefore saying that "AI, in terms of social impact, is like the mass production of clothing" is completely ungrounded.
Secundo, there are important qualitative differences that make subjects of these analogies more different than alike.
Tertio, people are usually, you know, ignorant of what were the real, immediate social impacts of past inventions. For example, steam machine is being presented as thing that freed a common person from mundane, hard work, but the actual outcome was quite the opposite.
Quarto, claims like "mass production benefitted 99% of population and raised the living standards for all" are very non-trivial, and ideologically loaded, especially if you consider environmental pollution, health hazards, social atomization, worker alienation, and so on.
I find it amusing you keep insulting me as "ignorant" of the past while all your points rest on the Golden Age Fallacy.
You seem to have invented a fanciful storybook idea of how the average person lived before the industrial revolution, and have ignored every single one of the downsides and discounted all of the upsides of the past 200 years.
There's no further argument to be had though, because yours is not a rational position, but one rooted in emotional feelings and personal frustration. You believe a past you never experienced was better. No logical rebuttal I waste time assembling can refute a fantasy world.
First, there is no such thing as Golden Age fallacy.
Second, you created a strawman just to feel better.
> have ignored every single one of the downside
I didn't. I said your claims are non-trivial, and enumerated some examples of downsides created by past technical revolutions. There were upsides, there were downsides. It was you who have claimed that "99% are better off". I never claimed anything like that, nor anything that could be considered an opposite..
> You believe a past you never experienced was better
Point me to the exact place where I expressed such belief.
> No logical rebuttal I waste time assembling can refute a fantasy world
You couldn't assemble logical rebuttal because the issue at stake is material, not logical. Learn the difference.
I get it, you are a fragile snowflake that cannot bear criticism, but please, don't put words into my comments even though you cannot find them there.
>I never thought I’d see the day when the open source “information wants to be free” crowd is complaining about intellectual property and “stylistic inspiration sources.
Please stop pretending to be debating many people when you are responding to a single person, otherwise quote specific statements that you think you are responding from "the crowd". No, you should not be surprised when OSS people reevaluate the landscape any time they witness OSS being weaponized against them even though the possibility of that happening is written on "the tin" so to speak. There have been an increasing number of debates around well-known cases a decade or half before the advent of this most recent incarnation of AI. Companies with deeper pockets and larger market access burying a popular OSS product through duplication was a common category.
Do you think these anti-AI folk wouldn't evaluate the situation differently if AI, trained on public data was in fact a public utility, seeing as you are concerned about democratization?
>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.
Before mass production only the aristocrats and royalty could own a closet full of clothing and shoes.
If we blocked the creation of the assembly line and factories, we would return to that state where everyone is basically a subsistence farmer living in the dirt with nothing.
> 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.
> it's looking more like less than 1% benefiting at the expense of 85%?
Your model of the world is wrong. 85% (even 99%) of people do not create any art, software, music, etc.
The vast majority of people are consumers of any given craft, and the 1% of the most passionate in a given field are creators, as has always been the case. It’s the same with people who create websites vs consume them.
> mass production has driven most of the makers out of business and ones that remain I can't afford
Again, your model of the world is wrong.
There was never a time when getting everything made bespoke was cheap. You’re pretending everyone was a rich aristocrat nobleman in the past if you think this is the case.
Historically you just wouldn't have a closet or enough clothing to fill it at all.
> 85% of people do not create any art, software, music, etc.
Etc.? I think you're overlooking a very broad range of occupations. From people getting into politics by doing newspaper summaries for party offices to people editing newspapers.
And if you're really pushing that it's 99% benefiting while 1% lose out then where do the kids whose schools get bombed or the women harassed with deepfakes fit in? Do they still benefit because they don't have to go to the trouble of writing a song about their pain?
It's the same companies and the same technologies doing all these things.
Let's not even get into the inauguration gifts in the US etc...
> You’re pretending everyone was a rich aristocrat nobleman in the past
I'm not pretending anything and my world model isn't "wrong." I don't mind having this discussion but I would ask you to mind your manners.
> There was never a time when getting everything made bespoke was cheap.
In my lifetime my family had many things made to order; from clothes to furniture. And I grew up in one of the poorest parts of the country, a working class area. But that meant that everyone worked and everyone had trades. My grandfather made me toys from scrap wood at the shipyard, my uncle was a joiner who made us better quality tables than I can get now, another was a plumber who ensured everything ran smoothly in our pipes. My aunts knitted and sewed everything we wanted. When a new fashion came out like skinny jeans they would tighten the ones we had; at Halloween I only had to say what I wanted to dress up as and the costume would appear.
Now if I go to the same area everyone is surviving on state benefits, the skills are all automated away and everyone is sitting in the same gray houses with the same gray furniture. And everyone looks miserable.
But at least no one has to do any expressionist painting to let their emotions out, they can just prompt it now and enjoy more and more consumption.
When all AI-generated code and images are open source/public domain by default, I will agree to your point. Until then, I will keep thinking it is stolen Valor, and that apologist are bootlickers.
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.
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.
My worry is that, at least among the artists I know, many kept themselves afloat early career by doing commercial freelance jobs like illustrations for local events or companies. Those kinds of jobs might largely vanish.
On the other hand, with the internet inevitably becoming swamped by AI generated content, I can definitely see a de-digitalization of art moving into offline spaces. At least for independent work, you don’t necessarily need mass appeal or exposure, but rather access to individuals and small groups with an actual willingness to pay for art.
I suppose with those same artists, at least for the smarter members of the group, might start using AI for basic commercial freelance jobs and just act as the human review, perhaps doing some final adjustments to the finished artwork.
So instead of being paid a small amount of money for something that they spend hours on, they create 10 artworks in that same number of hours and earn 10x what they did previously.
> I suppose with those same artists, at least for the smarter members of the group, might start using AI for basic commercial freelance jobs and just act as the human review, perhaps doing some final adjustments to the finished artwork.
And how they create demand for this? AI "enthusiasts" are enthusiastic about it exactly because they feel they don't need to outsource things to meatbags.
That's not art though, and while it might have paid a small amount of money, it can also be incredibly degrading and soul crushing. That's the kind of work that AI tools are doing now. Those jobs should vanish. People shouldn't need to degrade themselves for money, we can have a system where people are generally taken care of, and the people who build extra cool shit can live even better.
Why not? Would you also argue that most of the works by painters like Rembrandt, such as The Night Watch aren't art - just because they were contracted to make it? Does book cover art stop being art the second a book's title gets placed on it?
And sure, plenty of corporate work is boring and soulless. But the worst of that switched to spending 10 minutes with clipart and PowerPoint decades ago: if you were still hiring an artist, you cared at least a little about what the result looked like, which means there was at least some space for artistic vision.
> People shouldn't need to degrade themselves for money, we can have a system where people are generally taken care of
We should, but we don't. What's your proposal for letting artists grow and mature while paying their bills in the meantime? AI is currently killing their "degrading" jobs, do you think forcing them to take a shift at McDonald's is going to help their artistic career advance?
Rembrandt would argue that he was a craftsman, although some of the liberties he took in stuffing his paintings with hidden innuendo and symbolic jokes at the expense of some of his clients, definitely makes many of his paintings works of art.
Alas, only when taking a shirt at MacDonald's becomes equaly obsolete, and it has been made apparent that any task or job humans do could also be done by technology, only then will it help the artist in your example with their artistic career.
It is remarkable, when you think about it, that artists seem to be the first people that are made to feel obsolete. There are plenty of jobs that could have been fully automated, steampunk-style, from the moment the industrial revolution took hold.
Maybe it becomes slightly less remarkable if you take into consideration that collecting/investing in art has always been an integral part of people of considerable wealth. Even if they did not care much for it, didn't understand any of it, or were only motivated for the money,... regardless of your field, being very wealthy forced you into developing at least some connection with art. The billionaires in tech all seem to be an exception to this rule, and their lack of any connection with art, may have made them feel that art is easiest of all to replace using generative software. And for them, this was probably true - and they lack the connection to have developed any taste or eye for quality in art, so they're easily pleased with something a computer makes for them.
If only the artists are actively excluded though, people in other jobs will never fully appreciate that given the effort, their job is just as easily automated. Once people in every possible job have been made to feel just as obsolete, the world may be ready to order itself based on individual preference and mutual appreciation of whatever it is you choose to do 'for a living'.
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.
All complicated commercial art (movies, series, games, music, designed spaces...) has its budget as a key constraint of what is built. You don't get a new season of an anime that looks 4 times better because of a random genius: Someone evaluates the money it will make, and somehow decides that increasing the animation budget will be worthwhile. It was the same when it was animated by hand, with huge cameras and cels, than in modern digital-first animation, and whether it's using plain hand-ish drawn 2d, or using 3d models for some shots. The art is tied to the budget, and maybe the next season the budget is 2/3rds of what it was before, and the technical quality drops (see One Punch Man, Blue Lock and such)
So when an artist looks at AI, it's unlikely to be as a tool that will build a whole piece: Insufficient control, and currently nowhere near good enough to do more than occupy space, like a little painting in a hallway or in a hotel room. But it is something that can be used to better spend the budget in places where it'll be more impactful for the quality of the piece. Not unlike how CGI is often used today in places where it wouldn't have been 20 years ago, and it's aiming to be invisible. Not because the shot was impossible, but because it's cheaper.
Treating AI in art as a moral thing will end up being like the people being against synthesizers in the 80s: It's a viable creative choice for some things, but ultimately not a good expectation for industry direction. Ultimately the vast majority of art is commercial, and we'll see shortcuts being taken for budgetary reasons. Nobody is manually animating every detail of every mesh in a game like this was Toy Story. And even though doing that would produce more work for artists, it wouldn't make better games, really. And we'd sure have far fewer of them.
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.
Both your articles are from big companies. I think what gamers dont like is big game companies replacing jobs. Solo creators and small teams using AI can create stuff that would never exist otherwise. I also think the whole anti ai thing is a fad though so maybe Im projecting. Im also not convinced that articles like this represent majority opinion.
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.
I think this is only true in a vague and abstract way. In reality, AI devalues labor (in general) and the worth of artists (in specific).
Good art requires good patronage and institutional support in turn. No one will have time to produce the next Mona Lisa if they're barely able to make end's meet working a slavish factory job. That's doubly true when the vocations that supported artists—either antiquated, modern, or contemporary (painter, typesetter, graphic designer, etc.)—vanish because AI can do "just about as well."
Art isn't just a divine presence gracing the souls of those deemed most worthy, it's a collection of skills and knowledge that must be built by community over decades of struggle.
On top of the generation of slop, AI is removing some of the final protections that hold these pillars up. That is what should keep us up at night.
> I don't think you'll find anyone who actually enjoys art hanging up anything produced by AI on their walls
This does feel like a setup for a no true scotsman argument. What would your definition of 'actually enjoying art' be that would not exclude someone enjoying art that uses generative AI by definition?
> Artists are not at threat, if anything, AI makes original artworks more precious & enjoyable.
Sure, but how are you going to find it?
I've got a print of some digital work by Simon Stålenhag on my wall. I discovered his work because I was was mesmerized by an image of his on some wallpaper sharing website, ages ago.
These days that kind of website is 99% AI slop. AI has made it impossible to stumble across art: either you consume what the big corporations are feeding the masses, or you have to already be part of a strongly-curated niche art community.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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?
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.
