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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.


Artists should be able to choose whether their work gets used to train machine learning algorithms.


This is a very vague statement that covers both opt-in and opt-out.




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