@Faraday said in AI PBs:
but that doesnāt mean we have to let tech companies run rampant either.
Thatās a tricky phrase. Iām not sure the context you mean it in.
At this point it is highly unlikely, in any practical sense, that we can do anything about tech companies running rampant.
When has that ever happened before in any meaningful way?
@Faraday said in AI PBs:
and itās not good for the world if artists have no incentive to share their art.
The artist issue is one that I have an unpopular opinion about, at least on this forum, but that statement is definitely a problematic opinion.
It suggests that the only, or main, incentive for creating art is financial gain. But there are many other reasons that art is created. The trope of the starving artist is a trope for a reason. Many artists do art just for artās sake, even if there is no money in it, which, in most cases, there is not. Art for artās sake is the motto of MGM Studios, despite the mountains of cash they make in entertainment. If youāre only creating art for financial incentive, youāre not being displaced by AI, youāre just competing with it in a market thatās historically been brutal for artists. It just means that your art has to be subjectively better than what AI can produce - by any possible metric. You have a soul. AI doesnāt. You can truly create. AI canāt. These are all the arguments made, but at the end of the day, does that make your art more marketable than AI art? If the reason you do art it is financial, you better hope so.
Is it easier to do art when youāre getting paid for it? Sure. But art is hardly the only medium that AI is taking over and I donāt know why it gets romanticized as a protected class that needs saving, exempt from the same pressures that affect every other job in a capitalist system. Iād love to game, or dance, or write all day instead of working a job, but there isnāt any money in it for 99.9% of people who can do it. So I donāt do it. The world I live in sets the reality I have to operate within. And AI is now part of the world that we live in.
But on the flip side, there are plenty of venues where computers are better but havenāt taken over. Computers can play chess and beat grand masters, but they havenāt stopped chess tournaments. AI can outplay most people in competitive video games, but e-sports hasnāt crumbled.
Again, the problem isnāt AI. The problem is people. When people value human work/creation/skill, there will be money to follow. If they donāt, there wonāt be. There are tons of concern for artists put out of work by AI, but not much for the customer service reps that are being cut at a far higher rate. Hasbroās Dungeonās and Dragons tribulations are a battle ground for that right now. They first said they wouldnāt use AI art, then they got caught using AI art, then they pretty much abandoned their pledge to not use AI. There was a big ado and calls for boycotts. But do people still buy their product? Yes. Absolutely.
If people value art made by other people, theyāll find it and pay for it. If they donāt, no amount of regulation or gatekeeping will save it. AI doesnāt kill art. People choosing convenience, price, or novelty does. And because people are the worst, artists suffer.
And copyright law⦠well, thatās also a joke, like most laws. The punchline here is that the ālawā is heavily favored to big corporations and companies with expensive legal teams that make it increasingly easy to steal from individuals who canāt afford to fight back in court. It definitely does not favor the majority of artists, most of whom are forced to sell the rights to their art to some soulless company or corporation āin perpetuity and throughout the universeā in order to make scraps of money from it.
@Faraday said in AI PBs:
The industrial revolution caused a whole lot of chaos before we had reform and regulations to make it better. And for all the faults of the modern world, things are better in countless ways than they were in the 1870s.
I agree.
The Industrial Revolution happened over many decades. But it took just as many decades for laws and regulations to catch up to what has happening - for many of the same reasons it wonāt work today. Too much money and influence on the side of the people with the new toys. In the meantime people were brutally and inhumanly pushed past their limits for generations with what weād today consider abuses in order to feed the industrial machine. But here, today, AI isnāt playing out over decades, itās evolving over months, across dozens of industries.
Governments are barely able to define what an LLM is, let alone agree on how to regulate it. Meanwhile, companies are training new models, with trillions of parameters, trained on questionable data sources, and putting them out before the public even understands the risks.
So yes, regulation is an option. But trying to regulate AI is like putting a rookie traffic cop on a Formula 1 track. They can try to slow things down, but no oneās gonna listen. In the absolute worst case scenario, they move their servers to another country with less scruples without missing more than a beat.