Comment by yannyu

> All of these AI outputs are both polluting the commons where they pulled all their training data AND are alienating the creators of these cultural outputs via displacement of labor and payment

No dispute on the first part, but I really wish there were numbers available somehow to address the second. Maybe it's my cultural bubble, but it sure feels like the "AI Artpocalypse" isn't coming, in part because of AI backlash in general, but more specifically because people who are willing to pay money for art seem to strongly prefer that their money goes to an artist, not a GPU cluster operator.

I think a similar idea might be persisting in AI programming as well, even though it seems like such a perfect use case. Anthropic released an internal survey a few weeks ago that was like, the vast majority, something like 90% of their own workers AI usage, was spent explaining allnd learning about things that already exist, or doing little one-off side projects that otherwise wouldn't have happened at all, because of the overhead, like building little dashboards for a single dataset or something, stuff where the outcome isn't worth the effort of doing it yourself. For everything that actually matters and would be paid for, the premier AI coding company is using people to do it.

> AND are alienating the creators of these cultural outputs via displacement of labor and payment

YES. Thank you for these words. It's a form of ecological collapse. Thought to be fair, the creative ecology has always operated at the margins.

But it's a form of library for challenges in the world, like how a rainforest is an archive of genetic diversity, with countless application like antibiotics. If we destroy it, we lose access to the library, to the archive, just as the world is getting even more treacherous and unstable and is in need of creativity

> I think it's even more pernicious than the paper describes as cultural outputs, art, and writing aren't done to solve a problem, they're expressions that don't have a pure utility purpose. There's no "final form" for these things, and they change constantly, like language.

Being utilitarian and having a "final form" are orthogonal concepts. Individual works of art do usually have a final form - it's what you see in museums, cinemas or buy in book stores. It may not be the ideal the artist had in mind, but the artist needs to say "it's done" for the work to be put in front of an audience.

Contrast that with the most basic form of purely utilitarian automation: a thermostat. A thermostat's job is never done, it doesn't even have a definition of "done". A thermostat is meant to control a dynamic system, it's toiling forever to keep the inputs (temperature readings) within given envelope by altering the outputs (heater/cooler power levels).

I'd go as far as saying that of the two kinds, the utilities that are like thermostats are the more important ones in our lives. People don't appreciate, or even recognize, the dynamic systems driving their everyday lives.

> So either training data is going to get more expensive because you're going to have to pay creators, or these models will slowly drift away from the contemporary cultural reality.

Nah, more likely is that contemporary cultural reality will just shift to accept the output of the models and we'll all be worse off. (Except for the people selling the models, they'll be better off.)

You'll be eating nothing but the cultural equivalent of junk food, because that's all you'll be able to afford. (Not because you don't have the money, but because artists can't afford to eat.)