Item — HN Reader

Why do you deserve to reap the benefits of their labour while not giving them a cent? Just saying "but open source!" Isn't a valid argument, everyone who wants access to someone else's work should be forced to pay, this includes the current big players that have so far been circumventing paying people for their work.

It's attitudes like these from the AI sycophants that makes people despise the technology and anyone involved in any of it. I don't give a shit how difficult not having free unfettered access to everyone else's work makes it for you. I don't care that we're supposedly holding the world back (from infinite machine-generated spam made for the sole purpose of making everyone else's lives maximally miserable).

1 comments

In general, the goal of labor is to enrich the society you live in. Whether it’s capitalism or socialism, the theory is the same: the richer your society, the happier you’ll be, even if you’re poor. Objectively, the poorest in America live far better than the poorest in poor countries.

Then there is the harm argument. What is the harm to authors of letting AI models do this? Models aren’t replacing authors any time soon. And even if they were, you won’t be able to stop it; precisely zero times in history have people stood against a wave of new technology. Technology wins 10 out of 10 times in the long run.

I am skeptical that authors deserve anything for merely having a transformative use of their work. But I’m also sympathetic. The key is for authors to get a slice of the actual market value. Right now authors are shutting everyone down merely for using their work at all, with no consideration of whether anyone is even profiting.

Yet even when authors deserve a cent, how do you decide which authors get how many cents? Do all profits go to copyright holders, as with YouTube? Then there’s no room to run a service. Is half fair? Before or after company expenses? And whatever is allocated, is it distributed evenly among all 100,000 authors, whether they’re Stephen King or just an enthusiastic contributor to AO3? $1M in profits distributed to 100,000 authors is a whopping $10 per author. That’ll buy them a Happy Meal and fries. It’s far more lucrative to make up imaginary damages and sue them in court.

It’s immensely complicated, and it’s not at all clear that it’s evil or even exploitative to train AI models on other people’s work.