unironically saying “the sharing economy” in the year of our lord 2024 is… certainly a choice

also

God knows we old-timers tried to be cynical about ChatGPT, pedantically insisting that AI was actually just machine learning and that Altman’s new toy was nothing but cheap mimicry. But the rest of the world knew better

idk dude I’ve talked to the rest of the world about this and most of them actually seem to dislike this technology, it seems like maybe you didn’t actually try very hard to be cynical

Well, if this guy’s quite confident, then I’m sure it’ll all pan out in the end. How hard could symbolic reasoning be, really? Incidentally, I’ve been in a coma since 1970

That seems bad but also not super relevant to the point under discussion! Unless your point is that it’s bad when a cultural commons is exploited for business profits – in which case, I agree, but, well…

Haha, sounds like we might have to agree to disagree on this one.

Copyright is much older than 1904, though! It dates back to the printing press, when it became necessary because the new technology made it possible to benefit off writers’ work without compensating them, which made it hard to be a writer as a profession, even though we want people to be able to do that as a society. Hey, wait a minute…

Yeah but this presumes “the best way to beat 'em is to join 'em,” right? Like, when all the operating systems or databases are proprietary, that’s bad because those things are really useful and help you do things better and faster than you would otherwise.

But this argument applied here is like, oh no, what if large entertainment companies start making all their movies out of AI garbage, and everyone else can’t do that because they can’t get the content licensed? Well… what if they do? Does that mean they’re going to be making stuff that’s better? Wouldn’t the best way to compete with that be not to use the technology because you’ll get a higher-quality product? Or are we just giving up on the idea of producing good art at all and conceding that yes we actually only value cheapness and quantity?

Also, just on a personal level, for me as a J. Random Person who uploads creative work to the internet (some of which is in common crawl), but who doesn’t work for a major entertainment corporation that has rights to my work, I would really prefer to have a way to say “sorry no, you can’t use my stuff for this.” I don’t really find “well you see, we need to be able to compete with large entertainment companies in spam content generation, so we need to be able to use your uncompensated labor for our benefit without your permission and without crediting you” particularly compelling.

Even with good data, it doesn’t really work. Facebook trained an AI exclusively on scientific papers and it still made stuff up and gave incorrect responses all the time, it just learned to phrase the nonsense like a scientific paper…