| HN Mirror

> These irrelevant industries need to stop holding us all back and just disappear already.

Like artists, sculptors, writers, photographers, narrators, musicians, composers, and so forth? The very same industries AI requires to exist for training?

They will disappear. And we will be poorer for that.

Nope. People with the impulse to create will do it regardless. Sellouts without intrinsic motivation to create who are just looking to make money by creating products instead of real art? I won't mourn their disappearance at all.

That's an assumption that has not been tested in modern times. At least in the past, an artist could sell their painting.

And even if the assumption proves to be true, the volume will decrease dramatically as people are no longer allowed to make a living to create their art.

And no, Patreon and its ilk is not a sufficient replacement, not for full time jobs. It mostly doesn't even replace a job for the (comparatively few) people on it today.

EDIT: I for one will miss movies like "Everything Everwhere All At Once", which could not have been made as an "impulse" project.

> That's an assumption that has not been tested in modern times.

It's a fact as old as humanity itself. People will create because that's what people do. What isn't guaranteed is the existence of the billion dollar copyright industry.

> an artist could sell their painting.

Still perfectly possible to sell the physical canvas you applied paint to.

> the volume will decrease dramatically as people are no longer allowed to make a living to create their art

So what? That's a good thing. The market is filled with cheap art that's made just to sell copies, stuff that wouldn't even exist at all if not for the profit. I don't consider that a big loss at all.

JohnFen 1158 days ago

> I don't consider that a big loss at all.

And yet you're cheering on AI that will dramatically increase the amount of cheap art that's made just to sell copies.

So worst case scenario is just more of the same. I'm OK with that.

CuriouslyC 1158 days ago

Um, people are still blacksmithing and riding old tymie bikes, so I'm pretty sure it has been tested.

Yes. A tiny fraction of a percent of people (compared to the volume of smiths in the past) do continue traditional blacksmithing.

The results of their work is not IP though, which makes the comparison too weak to serve as proof that artistic works that create only IP will continue unabated.

CuriouslyC 1158 days ago

Blacksmiths in America don't make money, it's a hobby they do for fun. If the argument is that people will stop doing hobbies because a machine can do the work faster and better I'm pretty sure that's been proven wrong.

JohnFen 1158 days ago

> People with the impulse to create will do it regardless.

But they may not publicly release it. I've already removed my works from the public web, and I've heard from several others that have done the same.

That's OK. I don't publish everything I make either. Just stuff I actually want people to see and have access to.

JohnFen 1158 days ago

No, you misunderstand. The stuff is still published, because these are works that people want to share. They're just not on the open web anymore, they're invite-only web spaces, or internet spaces that aren't web-based at all, because there appears to be no other way to avoid having them used to train AIs.

I have no problem with that. I'd like to warn you that this is essentially security through obscurity. Only one copy ever needs to make it out of that closed space. The more people in there, the higher the odds of that happening. Once it does, all bets are off.

hammyhavoc 1158 days ago

Why shouldn't people be able to earn a living with their originality and skill? Sounds like envy to me.

Go ahead and earn your living. Just don't expect me to take absurdities like delusional people thinking they own numbers seriously.

> Just don't expect me to take absurdities like delusional people thinking they own numbers seriously.

The same governments that let you 'own' physical items are the ones who say you can 'own' IP as well.

If they didn't - and didn't back it up with force - you wouldn't 'own' anything at all. Cherry picking which version of ownership is 'absurd' is an exercise in futility, since it's not up to you.

Nah. I own physical things by literally holding onto them. Keeping them inside my property to which only I have the keys. Defending that property by force if necessary. Government doesn't have to "let" me own anything, it merely recognizes and formalizes the de facto reality of things. Meanwhile we have these people with their made up delusions of ownership of ideas and all the contradictions inherent in that, and I'm supposed to pretend it's not absurd?

Whether or not the world conforms to their made up copyright reality isn't really up to them either. The simple fact is: information, once discovered, is infinitely copyable. No amount of lobbying is ever gonna change that. People are still gonna train AI models with "their" data and there's nothing they can do about it short of destroying free computing as we know it by making it so we can only execute software they approve. Surely you don't want that, fellow Hacker News user, given that such tyranny is the antithesis of everything the word "hacker" stands for.

hammyhavoc 1158 days ago

Do people own property? Do they even have money? Do you own a license to your software? If it is all just on paper or on a screen, it's just numbers. The entire system is make-believe. If you choose not to believe in intellectual property, you must also acknowledge that other aspects of capitalism also do not actually exist and is a shared delusion.

However, the shared delusion makes the world go round as-is.

OK, "copyright bad", "intellectual property rights bad", so what's the alternative?

> If you choose not to believe in intellectual property, you must also acknowledge that other aspects of capitalism also do not actually exist and is a shared delusion.

I already do. Dollars? It's just paper, not even backed by anything. People believe in it so it has value for the time being. It will literally go to zero if people stop believing in it though.

It was hard for me to accept these truths. I don't post them here lightly.

> However, the shared delusion makes the world go round as-is.

People who choose to believe in delusions don't get to complain when reality inevitably comes creeping in.

> OK, "copyright bad", "intellectual property rights bad", so what's the alternative?

Post scarcity. Automate everything and provide abundance, eliminating the need for an economy to begin with.

OkGoDoIt 1158 days ago

But those artists with a true impulse to create still need to eat, pay for a place to live, etc. How exactly does that work?

Dunno. They'll probably get another job and use that to sustain their real interests. Or maybe AI will automate everything and we'll finally enter the age of post scarcity. I'm an optimist. What'll probably happen is we'll descend even further into cyberpunk hell.

krono 1158 days ago

A work that is protected by copyright - which most works are by default in the majority of cases - is by definition not in the public domain.

To offset that nitpicky line above a genuine question: if I were to produce a work and share it with you directly, in private, and perhaps for good measure clarify to you that I am only sharing it with you personally to hopefully get your feedback on whatever it is that I made, and that I do not want you to do anything else with it than the minimum that would be required to fulfil that purpose.

Wouldn't you then see any natural wrong in sharing my work with others or even the broader public, regardless?

> A work that is protected by copyright - which most works are by default in the majority of cases - is by definition not in the public domain.

Every single piece of idea is public domain from their inception. Actually, all ideas already exist, we humans just discover them. Ideas are information, information is bits and bits are numbers. All numbers already exist, and all "creation" is merely discovering those numbers.

Any assignment of ownership obviously happens after the fact and are completely ineffectual, especially in the 21st century, the age of information and networked computers with infinite ability to copy bits at negligible costs. The technology really exposes that sham for what it really is and it's a shame how everyone reacts by trying to destroy the perfectly good technology instead of fixing the fraud that is "intellectual property".

> Wouldn't you then see any natural wrong in sharing my work with others or even the broader public, regardless?

I'd see it as a very rude thing to do to you personally. Simply because you asked me not to do it and I generally try to be nice and respect people.

A natural universal ideological wrong though? No. Plenty of people publish the private communications they receive. It's just information. Publishing it might hurt my social standing with you buf I personally don't believe in anyone ever going to jail over it.

krono 1158 days ago

Now that you've written it out for me here (thanks for which btw, and for your thoroughness in particular), I see that I should have been able to infer your angle from your previous comment. For the record, not that I was meaning to imply anything with my hypothetical question, but now I know where you were coming from I see that it's not very relevant at all and I wouldn't have asked it.

It would require an unthinkable near unanimous societal willingness and cooperation, such comprehensive planning to the likes of which I believe humanity is practically incapable of today with currently available tools and mindsets, an ultra-careful and yet pertinacious iterative implementation process that will probably need to take place over a multi-generational timeframe.

If, however, we would somehow pull all that off and manage to rework our world into one that is entirely formed around the philosophy you describe above, then I am fully convinced that not only humanity, but also our planet and in fact the rest of the universe too would be better off for it.

blibble 1158 days ago

> They're the ones who insist on copyright so they can maintain the artificial scarcity delusion well into 2023 where AI is literally on its way to automating intellectual work.

AI won't be able to automate anything if we use the legal system to forcefully reduce the size of its training set by 99.999%

I have no doubt that at some point this technology will make it to our actual computers instead of being sioled away in some corporation's servers. That way there's nothing they can do about it unless they up the tyranny 1000x and destroy our freedom to execute any software we want on our own machines.

blibble 1158 days ago

> I have no doubt that at some point this technology will make it to our actual computers instead of being sioled away in some corporation's servers.

thankfully Moore's law is dead

> That way there's nothing they can do about it unless they up the tyranny 1000x and destroy our freedom to execute any software we want on our own machines.

I'd probably prefer this to a world where all knowledge workers become permanently destitute

and I suspect the vast majority of the world's electorates will agree

(do people prefer being able to eat over some ability to run software on their computer? I suspect so)