Hacker News Reader

Comment by rafram | Hacker News Reader

> “To put me to work that way, without remittance, is a form of slave labor,” said Wolff, professor emeritus of English and winner of the National Medal of Arts. “They’re using my work without paying for it. As time goes on, they’re going to make the lives of writers very difficult if there’s no fruit to their labor.”

This is obviously hyperbolic, but it was a very poor choice of words.

It also relies on an assumption - that AI will become a substitute for buying books - that I think is likely untrue. You’ve been able to easily gain a surface-level understanding of anything for free online for decades, and for that matter, you’ve been able to easily pirate any book for decades! Hasn’t stopped people from buying books, or going to college, or doing any number of other expensive things that are technically unnecessary if the goal is just to gain information.

View on HN

While I also agree that AI will probably not replace books, I think we can't deny that the AI companies are positioning AI as being able to replace books. Part of what makes pirating pirating is that you're trying to siphon the original revenue stream for yourself. Whether or not you're successful is one thing, but I do think that is Anthropic's intention.

They didn't, like, steal the books for ideological reasons or anything. They stole the books so they could then generate equivalents, so people will pay them instead of buy the original books. That's the entire value proposition of AI.

incredible, how hate poisons any conversation. Digital piracy is not and has never been about stealing revenue. And it is done for personal use, not commercial use.

Right but Anthropic is obviously not doing their piracy for "personal use". I'm not even anti-piracy, I just think that's it's clearly different when a multi-billion dollar company does it for the sole purpose of making many more billions off the backs of small creators and visionaries they don't pay.

This captures just how spectacularly out of touch Stanford types can be. Here’s a respected, successful professor at one of the world’s most prestigious universities. A baby boomer who has benefited enormously from one of the most prosperous periods in human history and, crucially, a straight, cis white man.

For someone with that much privilege to characterize the alleged infringement of his book’s copyright as having to endure a form of slave labor takes a staggering lack of self-awareness. It’s “you can’t write this shit” levels of obliviousness, and possibly the dumbest, most out-of-touch horseshit I’ve read all year.

And by Stanford types I mean privileged, successful people in general that one can associate with many other highly selective schools and employers.

It's a strange kind of conceptualization of slavery that extracts zero work from the victim.

In my view, slavery is more about freedom than work

It's sad to know that all of my creative work will be used to train future models whether I like it or not. Even if I release my work via physical media only, we've already seen Anthropic use their immense resources to obtain offline media to train their models. It feels like, as an artist, my work can never be kept from falling into the hands of AI companies.

I can empathise with his statement more easily when I think about it in those terms.

Franz Kafka told his friends, in no uncertain terms, that upon his death, his unfinished works should be burnt. This included The Trial and The Castle.

We never had the right to tell the future what to do. That was never part of the deal. We barely have the right to tell other people what to do with the ideas we breathe into the world, and that right was only carved into the US Constitution (and English common law before it) because it was believed that it heavily incentivized creating more ideas.

In the era where information flows as freely as it does... I'm not even sure that incentive works the way it was intended to anymore.

When I'm thinking about this, I usually flip the script: why should Disney have the right to tell everyone what they're allowed to do and not do with a picture and audio of a cartoon mouse for a person's actual entire life?

I like that all of my creative work is actively being used to train future models. It just means i am becoming part of AI. I will be in AIs thoughts, i will be a (miniscule but present) weight on its internal matrices. Influencing ever so slightly its output. People like to know what they leave behind when they've ceased to exist. Your art will live on inside of the AIs weights. Every answer the AI gives out, every thought, will be influenced by your creativity, by your unique way of seeing the world that you've put out into the world on the form of art.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com