He said it's sad, and no matter how you want to spin it, it still is incredibly sad and depressing that we're hailing the age of "semantic photocopiers" as some sort of intellectual achievement.
easyThrowaway: "I'll pretend your question is about fast fashion and TEMU!"
On top of this is the gross ethical concerns where all AI companies were allowed to steal all of this information/wisdom/art to train these models. At least with the power looms, a few skilled craftsmen were hired to help design them. This is blatant intellectual theft we're choosing to ignore because we're addicted to cheap products.
We choose temporary sensory pleasure over a healthy society.
I think the concern should be more on "you can't just extrapolate the same process forever and expect the same kind of outcome". Just because it was good in small amounts before doesn't necessarily mean it's inherently good to have an infinite capability to do that.
Regardless of all of that, I think it's important if we do have the AIs we're making we treat it as a common good in terms of wealth (regardless if people were paid) rather than a way to funnel a small amount of money to the companies who initially drive it as we are now. I.e. don't even mind if we "steal" (copy) everyone's available outputs as long as we all decide it should really benefit everyone rather than a handful.
No, I definitely see the difference, but I'm acknowledging that many people probably never cared all that much about how a beautiful thing is made, or at least not as much as they care about being able to have it.
I think it's a net good for the world for more people to be able to afford the things they like (after accounting for all externalities), even though of course it sucks for the craftsmen that lose their economic basis in the process.
> At least with the power looms, a few skilled craftsmen were hired to help design them. This is blatant intellectual theft we're choosing to ignore because we're addicted to cheap products.
I'm pretty sure this was little consolation to e.g. the Swing Rioters [1]. I suspect that this only seems less bad in hindsight. For many people whose livelihood was destroyed by mechanized agriculture, the power loom and other advances of technology during industrialization, I'm pretty sure it seemed equally catastrophic, if not more (18th century government welfare programs were somewhat lacking compared to modern standards).
All that said, while I do believe in human rights, I don't think there should be something like a "right for everyone to continue living like they are used to", which ultimately always means something like economic protectionism, artificial/subsidized demand etc. I'd much rather we find dignified ways to manage the transition for everybody than to engage in some elaborate pretense of economic necessity when there isn't one. If we only grant value or even basic human rights to economically productive workers, maybe that's something worth addressing anyway?
We've been talking about being sad about a lot of different things in this thread.
But here's another thing to be sad about (somewhat related to what I was originally sad about): building "semantic photocopier" is probably quite an intellectual achievement, but so was the atom bomb. intellectual achievements, even impressive ones, can't be assumed to be good.
To hail a "semantic photocopier" requires a pretty myopic and parochial view. Looked at holistically, this stuff amounts to a project to rub out the human and replace it with cheap, inhuman slop. One aspect if that is when I see a picture like this, it's ruined because when I look at it I'm unsure if I'm communing with a human or getting fooled by a simulacrum. Another aspect is how the slop undermines the viability of creative and intellectually engaging professions.
We really ought to look at the kind of world we want to live in (which would probably have maximum satisfying creative work, and a minimum of drudgery), preserve the good parts of what we have, and focus on intellectual achievements to subtract the bad parts. But instead we're just mindlessly building whatever we can manage, damn the consequences or end result (which seems to be: more drudgery, less creative expression).