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by roenxi 38 days ago
> It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up.

I doubt many individuals actually changed their opinions. Just that a large crowd of previously-silent people decided AI is a threat to them and they can attack it on copyright grounds. The AI revolution is a great argument against copyright law. The US's lax enforcement means that the incredible, world-changing tech could be built before the luddites got organised to try and stop it. The productive path appears to be illegal, but they took it anyway and we're all the better off for it.
2 comments
happytoexplain 37 days ago
The Luddites were rational and correct.
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roenxi 35 days ago
Probably. But not helpful.

Being rational and correct is a low bar, it is likely that all sides of any given debate a rational and correct to some extent. Someone dumping their entire life savings into a casino can be said to be rational and correct if the person doing it genuinely prioritises short term pleasure enough - still a stupid thing to do.

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goda90 38 days ago
Why do you think we're all better off?
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roenxi 38 days ago
The reasons that jump out at me are that, as a society, we're setting up to produce a more stuff with less effort, provide higher quality advice to everyone at an absurdly low cost, revolutionise research and it looks like we're going to be able to get a step-change improvement in the quality of economic management which is huge in and of itself. The wins seem like they're going to be big.
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goda90 37 days ago
> we're setting up to produce a more stuff with less effort

According to Jevon's paradox[0], this would lead to more consumption of resources. We're already straining at the limits of the Earth. Depletion and collapse won't be good for anyone.

> provide higher quality advice to everyone at an absurdly low cost

Given every LLM's propensity to hallucinate, the only quality advice is that which can be followed back to a human expert-vetted source. But we already have people who don't check sources and get bad advice.

> revolutionise research

Maybe, but AI is also being used in a mass spread of misinformation.

> a step-change improvement in the quality of economic management

I don't know exactly what you mean by this, but from what I'm seeing so far, this looks like it will massively increase wealth disparity, which is bad for most people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

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