If we had a safety net where career progression and time/money invested in training was unnecessary to sustain life, then maybe. Until then it feels like a bit of allowing a few people to plunder and own the collective output of millions.
This moment seems like trade guilds revolting against free craftsmen. What AI is essentially doing is learning skills from people according to their works and then helping everyone according to their needs. It's more rad than open source.
This is not plunder, it is empowerment. Blocking generative AI would be a huge power grab for copyright owners. They want to claim ideas and styles, and all their possible combinations.
Gen AI need only ensure it never reproduces a copyrighted work verbatim. Culture doesn't work if we stop ideas from moving freely.
I agree that preventing technology from dispersing generally prevents the creation of wealth. However, given our current economic structure, the downside in instability of a livelihood has dramatic effects on swaths of people who were unlucky enough to be disrupted -think of the dramatic costs of retraining, healthcare access, the high costs of diminished earnings, inability to accrue wealth and retire. Perhaps we could socialize these costs, but we don't and are unlikely to do so.
Another issue to look at is the lack of ownership of the tools of your trade. In a context where many use AI models to competitively produce, hosts of AI models essentially own the access to your trade - thereby able to charge a toll, or privilege certain behaviors for any who strive to make living with these tools. (of course this is happening now with plenty of software products). The ultimate trajectory of this is not democratization of a toolset, but a transfer of wealth from labor to capital. And keep in mind that the labor share of income has been steadily declining for half a century.
The creation of wealth from AI ultimately depends on the strength of democratic and pluralistic institutions that safeguard ownership of your trade, democratized access to capital, and safeguards of welfare in the environment of creative destrcution. Otherwise you wind up with the cotton gin.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Yes, I want artists and other creators to be compensated fairly for any work that they contribute into training datasets, but outside of that there is no moral responsibility AI creators should feel towards those whose potential careers would be impacted.
They aren't. Every person is free to use AI or not.
Go blame your fellow consumers if you don't like the fact that they prefer AI.
These are choices that everyone makes. AI companies alone aren't forcing everyone to use their cool new tools. Instead, thats a decision that 10s of millions of people are making every day.
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.“
