Comment by BenGosub 2 days ago
I understand that website studios have been hit hard, given how easy it is to generate good enough websites with AI tools. I don't think human potential is best utilised when dealing with CSS complexities. In the long term, I think this is a positive.
However, what I don't like is how little the authors are respected in this process. Everything that the AI generates is based on human labour, but we don't see the authors getting the recognition.
> we don't see the authors getting the recognition.
In that sense AI has been the biggest heist that has ever been perpetrated.
Only in exactly the same sense that portrait painters were robbed of their income by the invention of photography. In the end people adapted and some people still paint. Just not a whole lot of portraits. Because people now take selfies.
Authors still get recognition. If they are decent authors producing original, literary work. But the type of author that fills page five of your local news paper, has not been valued for decades. But that was filler content long before AI showed up. Same for the people that do the subtitles on soap operas. The people that create the commercials that show at 4am on your TV. All fair game for AI.
It's not a heist, just progress. People having to adapt and struggling with that happens with most changes. That doesn't mean the change is bad. Projecting your rage, moralism, etc. onto agents of change is also a constant. People don't like change. The reason we still talk about Luddites is that they overreacted a bit.
People might feel that time is treating them unfairly. But the reality is that sometimes things just change and then some people adapt and others don't. If your party trick is stuff AIs do well (e.g. translating text, coming up with generic copy text, adding some illustrations to articles, etc.), then yes AI is robbing you of your job and there will be a lot less demand for doing these things manually. And maybe you were really good at it even. That really sucks. But it happened. That cat isn't going back in the bag. So, deal with it. There are plenty of other things people can still do.
You are no different than that portrait painter in the 1800s that suddenly saw their market for portraits evaporate because they were being replaced by a few seconds exposure in front of a camera. A lot of very decent art work was created after that. It did not kill art. But it did change what some artists did for a living. In the same way, the gramophone did not kill music. The TV did not kill theater. Etc.
Getting robbed implies a sense of entitlement to something. Did you own what you lost to begin with?
Statistics are not theft. Judges have written over and over again that training a neural network (which is just fitting a high-dimensional function to a dataset) is transformative and therefore fair use. Putting it another way, me summarizing a MLB baseball game by saying the Cubs lost 7-0 does not infringe on MLB's ownership of the copyright of the filmed game.
People claiming that backpropagation "steals" your material don't understand math or copyright.
You can hate generative tools all you want -- opinions are free -- but you're fundamentally wrong about the legality or morality at play.
In the exact same way that it’s not theft if an artist-in-training goes to a museum to look at how other painters created their works.
But DID the Luddites overreact? They sought to have machines serve people instead of the other way around.
If they had succeeded in regulation over machines and seeing wealth back into the average factory worker’s hands, of artisans integrated into the workforce instead of shut out, would so much of the bloodshed and mayhem to form unions and regulations have been needed?
Broadly, it seems to me that most technological change could use some consideration of people
It's also important that most of AI content created is slop. On this website most people stand against AI generated writing slop. Also, trust me, you don't want a world where most music is AI generated, it's going to drive you crazy. So, it's not like photography and painting it is like comparing good and shitty quality content.
I don't think it's a meaningful distinction.
Robbing implies theft. The word heist was used here to imply that some crime is happening. I don't think there is such a crime and disagree with the framing. Which is what this is, and which is also very deliberate. Luddites used a similar kind of framing to justify their actions back in the day. Which is why I'm using it as an analogy. I believe a lot of the anti AI sentiment is rooted in very similar sentiments.
I'm not missing the point but making one. Clearly it's a sensitive topic to a lot of people here.
Website building started dying off when SquareSpace launched and Wix came around. WordPress copied that and its been building blocks for the most part since then. There are few unique sites around these days.