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by guitarlimeo 124 days ago
I liked the original title better "The Left Doesn't Hate Technology, We Hate Being Exploited". I think that sums up my grievances towards AI - amazing technology and certainly a booster to anyone's life, but what is the cost? Why AI companies get to download, consume and transform all copyrighted works essentially for free (I think there were some lawsuits that resulted in the companies paying), but normal people have to pay millions if they wanted to access all that data and pay to the original creators? I'm also not so ok with the workforce being displaced, but it's what happens with technological progress. But am not ok that it's displacing the writers while benefiting from their prior work without paying them a cent.
2 comments

I care a lot more about the environmental harm, the impact on computer hardware prices, and what AI is doing to the energy prices which somehow become everyone else's burden to pay than I am about the rampant copyright infringement.

The hypocrisy in how copyright is enforced for AI companies vs everybody else is pretty infuriating though. We have courts ruling against people for downloading youtube videos to enable them to use clips for fair use purposes (https://torrentfreak.com/ripping-clips-for-youtube-reaction-...) while Nvidia is free to violate the DMCA in the exact same way to take youtuber's content in full (https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/nvidia-accused-of-scraping-80-y...).

Not just that. An LLM is an universal middleman for anything creative. Books, code, music. Everything written, spoken or performed can be accessed as digested and mixed by the LLM. It breaks all content-relates business models by inserting a middleman, that seeks to capture as much value as possible while actively arguing the source of mediated content is not entitled to anything. This is not sustainable, as the content source will loose motivation, including non-monetary motivation. This in turn will stop the middleman being able to capture value created by them. But the ability to combine existing content without anything new being added is likely to be too little to offset the enormous costs involved. Whatever the outcome for the AI-bros, human content generation will decrease massively for a long while. Which has a massive detrimental effect on culture globally.