If Apple (or any metaphorical creator you want to insert in here) doesn’t want you using their product to make your movie, too bad. You bought their product. Even if millions of people end up watching your movie, they can’t turn around and ask for any more. You acquired their product fairly like anybody else. Your transaction is done. If they don’t like it, they should ask every person who’s ever made or contributed to any version of the components in their device and see how they feel about it.

Now people using ChatGPT to impersonate artists shouldn’t do that. But those individual people should be prosecuted. Nobody’s confused that Andy Warhol might be quickly painting the pictures and sending them over in the DALL-E chat and you can’t honestly make the argument that people aren’t buying Stephen King books because they can type “Write me a Stephen King novel” into the prompt generator.

By that rationalization, OpenAI is paying their Internet bill, and for a copy of Dune, so they’re free to use any content they acquired to make their product better. Your original argument wasn’t akin to, “Shouldn’t someone using an iPhone pay for one?” It was “Shouldn’t Apple get a cut of everything made with the iPhone?”

You could make the argument that people use ChatGPT to churn out garbage content, sure, but a lot of cinephiles would accuse your proverbial indie movie of being the same and blame Apple for creating the iPhone and enabling it. If you want to make that argument, go ahead. But don’t pretend it has anything to do with people getting paid fairly for what they made.

ChatGPT is enabling people to make more things, easier, to get paid. And people, as always, are relying on everything that was created before them as a basis for their work. Same as when I go to school and the professor shows me lots of different works to learn from. The thousands of students in that class didn’t pay for any of that stuff. The professor distilled it and presented it and I paid him to do it.

You’re making an indie movie on your iPhone with friends. You sell one ticket. You now owe: Apple, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s estate (inventor of the camera), every cinematographer who first devised the type of shots you’re using, the writers since the beginning of time that created the types of story elements in the script, the mathematicians and scientists that developed lense technology, the car manufacturers that aided your ability to transport you to the set, the guy who’s YouTube tutorial you watched to figure out lighting, etc, etc, etc.

Your black and white framing appears to provide a clear ethical framework until you dig a millimeter into it. The reality is that society only exists because of the work that all of the individuals within it produce. Things like copyright are an adapter to our capitalistic economy to ensure people’s work that can be copied, are protected enough that they have the opportunity to make money off of it. It exists so somebody else can’t immediately turn around and sell the same book someone else wrote, or just change a few words and do as such. This protection was meant to last 15 to 20 years. Then enter the public domain for anyone to copy and rewrite as they please.

Current copyright is an utter bastardization of its intended use. Massive corporations are trying to act like they’re fighting for the little guy to own their IP forever. But they buy up all that IP for pennies compared to how they turn around and commoditize it. Then they own all of what society produces in perpetuity. They can sit on their dragon hoards and laugh as they gobble up any new creation that strays too close. And people wonder why everything is a sequel of a sequel of a sequel owned by massive corporations.

I think what you’re forgetting is that intelligence, in general, is an emergent property of recording information and learning what actions to take based on them. The current work on AI is essentially trying to take this evolutionary behavior, make it less random, and compress the cycles of iteration down so that intelligence emerges quickly. This whole argument “It’s not smart like I’m smart” with only surface level observation about it’s current state and no critical observation about how intelligence came to be, just sounds really insecure.

I get it. Humans will likely not be the smartest thing in the arena soon. But stating matter-of-factly that AI is inherently different is born from an emotional viewpoint. I understand there ARE differences, but no more so then how there are differences between a human and a dog. Which if you’re honestly looking at the situation is impressively close to human intelligence in such a short time.

Fully agree. I understand why there are many technological doomers out there and I think AI may be the most deserving of a critical eye. But the immense benefits of being able to manufacture intelligence is undeniable. That NECESSITATES the AI being able to observe anything and everything in the world that it can. That’s how any known intelligence has ever learned and there’s no scientific basis for an intelligence coming into existence knowing everything about the world without it ever being taught about it.

Now I’ve heard a lot of criticism of AI. Some really legitimate concerns about their place in the future (and ours). As well as the ethics of this important technology originating in the private hands of mega corps that historically have not had our best interest at heart. But the VAST majority of criticism has been about how it’s not useful or is just an avenue for copyright abuse. Which at best, is just completely missing the point. But at worst, is the thinly vailed protests of people made very uncomfortable that the status quo is being upset.

What if they’re an electrician/plumber/repair man that needs a full kit of equipment and drives all over town. A contractor building a house transporting materials. A school/church/daycare transporting kids that doesn’t want to have them loose on public transport. Garbage man. Emergency services. Food delivery. Etc

Or if anyone’s job or hobby requires transporting more than can be carried on a bike trailer. Anyone living rurally. Anyone famous. People with mental conditions exacerbated by being enclosed with strangers. All that being said, I’d love to see a shift towards it being more popular.

All hail the nail and gear 😉

I’m not talking about vetting pictures. I’m talking about journalists who investigate issues THEMSELVES and uncover the truth. They take their OWN pictures and post them on their website and accounts putting their credibility as collateral. We trust them, not because it’s a picture, but because of who took it.

This already happened with text, people learned “Don’t believe everything you read!” And invented the press to figure out the truth. It used to be a core part of our society. But people were tricked into thinking pictures and video were somehow mediums of empirical truth, just because it’s HARD to fake. But never impossible. Which is worse, actually. So we neglected the press and let it collapse into a shit show because we thought we could do it ourselves.

So, shouldn’t the pretense that images are sources of truth evaporating, be a good thing?

If you’re getting your truth from somewhere you don’t trust, you’ve already lost the plot. Having a medium to convey absolute truth is NOT the exception, because it never existed. Not with first hand accounts, not with photos, not with videos. Anything, from its inception, has been able to be faked by someone motivated enough.

What we need is an industry of independent ethically driven individuals to investigate and be a trusted source of truth on the world’s important events. Then they can release journals about their findings. We can call them journalers or something, I don’t know, I don’t have all the answers. Too bad nothing like that exists when we need it most 🥲

I think this comment misses the point that even one doctored photo created by a team of highly skilled individuals can change the course of history. And when that’s what it takes, it’s easier to sell it to the public.

What matters is the source. What we’re being forced to reckon with now is: the assumption that photos capture indisputable reality has never and will never be true. That’s why we invented journalism. Ethically driven people to investigate and be impartial sources of truth on what’s happening in the world. But we’ve neglected and abused the profession so much that it’s a shell of what we need it to be.

Yeah, why would a farmer need a fancy calculator the size of a room? 🙄

There are tons of artists that copy others very closely. There are plenty of examples of A.I. making all kinds of unique and quirky artwork despite drawing from artworks. Feels like you’re backing into the grey area of option so that you can stick to a framework that fits a narrative.

That’s what they want to focus on. And hey, that’s great. But there’s no reason they need to limit how a user installed plugin can filter API requests. Ad blockers and the like were tools to help with the ads and tracking issue. So it’s great Google’s trying to help. But it mostly just seems like PR at this point.

God I hope it ends up splitting off Chrome. I think Google has done a great job with Chrome. But the recent Manifest v3 makes it clear they’re going to greatly degrade their users’ experience for Google’s bottom line. And they’re using their market dominance to do it.

Well it sounds like they’re doing something to make their products better, you just disagree that it’s going to be successful.

With all respect, your argument has a pretty obvious emotional valence. You don’t care if the result is 1:1, you care that it happened in a way that makes you uncomfortable. Art can be an outlet for self expression and no one is taking that away. What’s it to you if I enjoy asking an AI for art?

The fact of the matter is, capitalism has never been a good place for artists who want to follow their dream. If that’s something you want, then I’d suggest supporting the end of all work for money that automation provides. Then people can truly work on whatever they care about all day and not have to worry about feeding themselves.

How could this be?

Totally get where you’re coming from. Corporate greed seems like the boogie man behind capitalism. It’s easy to understand: make line go up. But I’m afraid the dark parts of capitalism are spookier than that. They don’t just want money. If that were the case they’d sell all those expensive corporate offices and let people be more productive at home.

They want people to lord over, they want the power to surveil them. To make them do team building exercises. They call themselves a family. They take team pictures with the CEO smiling in front. People think of them as heartless machines. But machines would try and make people happy, that’s when they work the best. No, they’re happy to have offices full of people twiddling their thumbs, they’re narcissists. Their whole incentive to climb the ladder is to be standing on someone else’s head.

Who are you king of, if there’s only robots around you?