It just struck me that a likely end-result of AIs are the Discworld elves:
> Elves have no proper imagination or real emotions, and therefore such things fascinate them. Because they cannot create they steal musicians and artists [... snipped ...] Even if an elf is, for reasons of its own, trying to be nice, its lack of understanding of humans mean there's always something "off" about it.
I am very uncomfortable with the idea of "this person or system cannot create, they can only steal". It seems very dehumanizing, and though LLMs aren't humans I could see the argument very easily turned on people. There is nothing specific to LLMs in it.
The people filling the wires with AI content they didn't write aren't fundamentally incapable of creation; they have chosen not to do it, and so are incapable only until they make a better choice.
It's not dehumanising to see the output of someone who isn't creating as uncreative.
There's this famous saying about the design of a bear-safe waste container for American national parks: "there is a considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bear and the dumbest tourist." Similarly, I suspect there is a considerable overlap between the creativity of the least creative human and the most creative LLM. Maybe it's that I've seen the same arguments raised for years about comic artists who traced off other people's work...
This will not remain limited to AIs. Learning requires imitation. Our artistic system is already pretty heavily copyrighted, but it could still be a lot more so, and I don't think this would be good for our culture.
> Elves have no proper imagination or real emotions, and therefore such things fascinate them. Because they cannot create they steal musicians and artists [... snipped ...] Even if an elf is, for reasons of its own, trying to be nice, its lack of understanding of humans mean there's always something "off" about it.