I have skills besides technical writing, but it’s one of the things I rely on to get hired. So yeah, I’m partially on the chopping block prior to creative writing. And it’s a serious problem that all the writing I’ve done on the internet is being used to train AI.
But the thing about the comparison to humans in morality is there’ll be a line that gets crossed. And once that line is crossed, you can’t OWN an AI anymore, and you certainly can’t sell it. Up until then, you have to treat it as a tool.
The end solution is going to be something along the lines of a Creative Commons license where you specific if your work can be used to train AI, if it can’t, or if it can only be used to train non-profit AI.
I don’t follow why calling it a tool matters. If a python script renders someone’s job redundant (hypothetically; this is unlikely in reality) does it matter if the script was written by a human or a LLM?
@effingjoe I imagine it matters to the person who wrote it. Were THEY paid for this?
I mean, it’s a shitty thing that consultants and such remove jobs, but at the very least the exploitation there is only on one side, the poor guy kicked out. If an LLM is removing someone’s job, then the people used to train the LLM are getting exploited too.
Plus, a certain amount of the law is for deterrence. We don’t want the companies replacing creatives with AI. It would be beneficial to discourage that. We DO want things like fruit-picking and weeding and other backbreaking manual labor replaced by AI, so we can push for laws that encourage THAT. But right now they are trying to replace the wrong end.
You’re going to need to strictly define “exploited”, I think. I don’t know what you mean when you use that term.
If I read a book on Python and write a script to replace someone’s job, did I exploit the person who wrote the book? What about the people that created and/or maintain python?
Why don’t we want companies replacing creatives with AI? Should we roll back other technological advances that resulted in fewer humans being employed? No human routes phone calls anymore, but they used to. Should their jobs be protected, too? What about people that used to carve ice out of mountain lakes and deliver it to businesses? Should refrigeration technology be held back by the law to protect those jobs? If not, why artists? What makes them more deserving of being protected?
Intent is a big deal in this one. Your Python book writer intended for people to read it to learn Python.
A romance book writer does not intend for an AI to use it to learn to generate sentences. But because there was no obvious barrier and they could get away with it, the companies grabbed the romance book and used it. That’s an exploit.
And again, you’re ignoring the quality of labor. Back-breaking jobs that hurt people’s health should be improved with technology. A migrant worker might lost his job to a mechanical fruitpicker but he’s likely bilingual and eligible for a translator job. Unless that job, which is better for health and longevity, and allows someone to stay in one place, is taken by an AI.
The promise of automation was that it would RAISE the quality of human life. Taking away the jobs of creatives lowers the quality of human life. Using automation to carve ice out of mountain lakes raises the quality of human life. Things are not neutral here.
The large companies want to keep manual labor in human hands and put creative work and decision making in AI hands. This is going to make life worse for everyone.
Intent is a big deal in this one. Your Python book writer intended for people to read it to learn Python.
I really don’t see where intent falls into this, still-- but feel free to change the hypothetical to looking at other people’s python code to learn how to use python. It still doesn’t change the equation. Did I exploit the people who wrote the python code that I learned from? Does my source of learning matter when it comes to what I produce? Do you really believe that artists create new art in a total vacuum, without drawing inspiration from prior art?
Back-breaking jobs that hurt people’s health should be improved with technology. A migrant worker might lost his job to a mechanical fruitpicker but he’s likely bilingual and eligible for a translator job. Unless that job, which is better for health and longevity, and allows someone to stay in one place, is taken by an AI.
I am somewhat stunned by the obvious bias you seem to have against manual labor. You really think having an active job is less healthy than sitting in a chair, looking at a screen all day? (Please note: 90% of my job is sitting in a chair, staring at a screen all day.)
There was no “promise of automation”. Technology was always going to take everyone’s jobs-- the only change is the order it has taken it in. It was assumed that human creativity was some special thing that was so difficult to define in software that it would be towards the end when it came to getting replaced, but it turns out that we’re a lot more like computers than we believe, and you can train software-- with relative ease-- to figure out how to achieve an end result without explicitly defining how.
Large companies want to reduce overhead, increase productivity, and maximize profit. I assure you there’s no bias as to what kind of jobs get replaced when it comes to those goals. It just happens that creative jobs seem to be easily replaced.
Do you really, honestly, think that it’s even possible to hold back a technological advance using legislation? You can already host your own LLMs and train them on whatever material you desire, to better tailor their output. That’s today. Even if we assume, for sake of argument, that the law does decide that people have a “right” to control how their art is consumed. (again, very unlikely imo), that won’t even slow down the people spinning up their own instances, and even if they follow the rules, how much worse do you really think the models would be using only public domain and open source training materials?
I don’t know, but there is no good reason to just sit there while the rich replace all the creatives with machines built using their work.
Hell, even if your point about manual labor being replaced is just as bad, I can think of a company that makes you BUILD the robot that will replace you before you get fired.
But honestly, there’s a reason people aspire to music and art and not to moving boxes at the dock, and it’s not because the moving boxes job is low class but because it is backbreaking, unpleasant labor where you don’t get to express yourself. But music and art and writing are forms of self-expression and some of the few places you can do self-expression during work. So those jobs should be preserved.
Maybe we can’t get some sort of justice in the system, but people should at least try.
You still seem to have a very specific idea of what manual labor is. You may not think you’d find manual labor jobs fulfilling or expressive, but that doesn’t mean no one does.
Could it be that you care more about creative jobs because you have one, and if you had a manual labor job you’d be arguing the opposite?
Edit: what, specifically, does “justice” in the system look like to you?
I have skills besides technical writing, but it’s one of the things I rely on to get hired. So yeah, I’m partially on the chopping block prior to creative writing. And it’s a serious problem that all the writing I’ve done on the internet is being used to train AI.
But the thing about the comparison to humans in morality is there’ll be a line that gets crossed. And once that line is crossed, you can’t OWN an AI anymore, and you certainly can’t sell it. Up until then, you have to treat it as a tool.
The end solution is going to be something along the lines of a Creative Commons license where you specific if your work can be used to train AI, if it can’t, or if it can only be used to train non-profit AI.
I don’t follow why calling it a tool matters. If a python script renders someone’s job redundant (hypothetically; this is unlikely in reality) does it matter if the script was written by a human or a LLM?
@effingjoe I imagine it matters to the person who wrote it. Were THEY paid for this?
I mean, it’s a shitty thing that consultants and such remove jobs, but at the very least the exploitation there is only on one side, the poor guy kicked out. If an LLM is removing someone’s job, then the people used to train the LLM are getting exploited too.
Plus, a certain amount of the law is for deterrence. We don’t want the companies replacing creatives with AI. It would be beneficial to discourage that. We DO want things like fruit-picking and weeding and other backbreaking manual labor replaced by AI, so we can push for laws that encourage THAT. But right now they are trying to replace the wrong end.
You’re going to need to strictly define “exploited”, I think. I don’t know what you mean when you use that term.
If I read a book on Python and write a script to replace someone’s job, did I exploit the person who wrote the book? What about the people that created and/or maintain python?
Why don’t we want companies replacing creatives with AI? Should we roll back other technological advances that resulted in fewer humans being employed? No human routes phone calls anymore, but they used to. Should their jobs be protected, too? What about people that used to carve ice out of mountain lakes and deliver it to businesses? Should refrigeration technology be held back by the law to protect those jobs? If not, why artists? What makes them more deserving of being protected?
Intent is a big deal in this one. Your Python book writer intended for people to read it to learn Python.
A romance book writer does not intend for an AI to use it to learn to generate sentences. But because there was no obvious barrier and they could get away with it, the companies grabbed the romance book and used it. That’s an exploit.
And again, you’re ignoring the quality of labor. Back-breaking jobs that hurt people’s health should be improved with technology. A migrant worker might lost his job to a mechanical fruitpicker but he’s likely bilingual and eligible for a translator job. Unless that job, which is better for health and longevity, and allows someone to stay in one place, is taken by an AI.
The promise of automation was that it would RAISE the quality of human life. Taking away the jobs of creatives lowers the quality of human life. Using automation to carve ice out of mountain lakes raises the quality of human life. Things are not neutral here.
The large companies want to keep manual labor in human hands and put creative work and decision making in AI hands. This is going to make life worse for everyone.
I really don’t see where intent falls into this, still-- but feel free to change the hypothetical to looking at other people’s python code to learn how to use python. It still doesn’t change the equation. Did I exploit the people who wrote the python code that I learned from? Does my source of learning matter when it comes to what I produce? Do you really believe that artists create new art in a total vacuum, without drawing inspiration from prior art?
I am somewhat stunned by the obvious bias you seem to have against manual labor. You really think having an active job is less healthy than sitting in a chair, looking at a screen all day? (Please note: 90% of my job is sitting in a chair, staring at a screen all day.)
There was no “promise of automation”. Technology was always going to take everyone’s jobs-- the only change is the order it has taken it in. It was assumed that human creativity was some special thing that was so difficult to define in software that it would be towards the end when it came to getting replaced, but it turns out that we’re a lot more like computers than we believe, and you can train software-- with relative ease-- to figure out how to achieve an end result without explicitly defining how.
Large companies want to reduce overhead, increase productivity, and maximize profit. I assure you there’s no bias as to what kind of jobs get replaced when it comes to those goals. It just happens that creative jobs seem to be easily replaced.
Do you really, honestly, think that it’s even possible to hold back a technological advance using legislation? You can already host your own LLMs and train them on whatever material you desire, to better tailor their output. That’s today. Even if we assume, for sake of argument, that the law does decide that people have a “right” to control how their art is consumed. (again, very unlikely imo), that won’t even slow down the people spinning up their own instances, and even if they follow the rules, how much worse do you really think the models would be using only public domain and open source training materials?
I don’t know, but there is no good reason to just sit there while the rich replace all the creatives with machines built using their work.
Hell, even if your point about manual labor being replaced is just as bad, I can think of a company that makes you BUILD the robot that will replace you before you get fired.
But honestly, there’s a reason people aspire to music and art and not to moving boxes at the dock, and it’s not because the moving boxes job is low class but because it is backbreaking, unpleasant labor where you don’t get to express yourself. But music and art and writing are forms of self-expression and some of the few places you can do self-expression during work. So those jobs should be preserved.
Maybe we can’t get some sort of justice in the system, but people should at least try.
You still seem to have a very specific idea of what manual labor is. You may not think you’d find manual labor jobs fulfilling or expressive, but that doesn’t mean no one does.
Could it be that you care more about creative jobs because you have one, and if you had a manual labor job you’d be arguing the opposite?
Edit: what, specifically, does “justice” in the system look like to you?
Maybe.
Edit: An end to large tech companies scraping the internet and collecting everyone’s data with impunity.