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Comment by singingboyo | Hacker News Reader

There are legitimate criticisms that AI is harming creative endeavours. AI output is sort of by definition not particularly innovative. By flooding spaces with repetitive AI work, it may be drowning out the basis for truly innovative creation. And maybe it does suppress development of skills it tries to replace.

The appropriation argument is somewhat unsound. Creative endeavors, by definition, build on what's come before. This isn't any different between code, creative writing, drawing, painting, photography, fashion design, music, or anything else creative. Creation builds on what came before, that's how it works. No one accuses playwrights of appropriating Shakespeare just because they write a tragic romance set in Europe.

The hyperbolic way you've made whatever arguments you had, though, is actively working against you.

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The people who built this technology needed to use hundreds of millions of images without permission. They regularly speak explicitly about all the jobs they plan to destroy. If you think I'm being hyperbolic then you don't understand the scale of the issue, frankly.

> The people who built this technology needed to use hundreds of millions of images without permission.

It remains unclear if they needed permission in the first place. Aside from Meta's stunt with torrents I'm not aware of any legal precedent forbidding me to (internally) do as I please with public content that I scrape.

> They regularly speak explicitly about all the jobs they plan to destroy.

A fully legal endeavor that is very strongly rewarded by the market.

> I'm not aware of any legal precedent forbidding me to (internally) do as I please with public content that I scrape.

Because all the litigation is currently ongoing.

> A fully legal endeavor that is very strongly rewarded by the market.

Yes let's sacrifice all production of cultural artifacts for the market. This is honestly another thing that's being litigated. So far these companies have lost a lot of money on making a product that most consumers seem to actively hate.

Precisely. So when you say they used the images without permission, you are knowingly making a false implication - that it was known to them that they needed permission and that they intentionally disregarded that fact. In reality that has yet to be legally established.

Who said anything about sacrificing production? The entire point of the tooling is to reduce the production cost to as near zero as possible. If you didn't expect it to work then I doubt you would be so bent out of shape over it.

I find your stance quite perplexing. The tech can't be un-invented. It's very much Pandora's box. Whatever consequences that has for the market, all we can do is wait and see.

Worst case scenario (for the AI purveyors) is a clear legal determination that the current training data situation isn't legal. I seriously doubt that would set them back by more than a couple of years.

You might be surprised to learn that ethics and legality are not always the same and you can do something that's technically legal but also extremely shitty like training AI models on work you didn't create without permission.

I'm not surprised by that at all. It just seems that we disagree about the ethics of the matter at hand.

I'd like to suggest that you might be better received on HN if you were a bit more direct about making an argument of substance regarding the ethics.

"Data Laundering": Commercial entities fund (either with money or compute tokens) academic entities which, in turn, create AI models which the commercial entities sell. https://waxy.org/2022/09/ai-data-laundering-how-academic-and...

Again, it's unclear how exactly that's against the law. Provided that the data was obtained legally, of course.

Most of the larger commercial entities seem to be doing the work themselves and being quite upfront about the entire thing.

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