I heard a bunch of explanations but most of them seem emotional and aggressive, and while I respect that this is an emotional subject, I can’t really understand opinions that boil down to “theft” and are aggressive about it.
while there are plenty of models that were trained on copyrighted material without consent (which is piracy, not theft but close enough when talking about small businesses or individuals) is there an argument against models that were legally trained? And if so, is it something past the saying that AI art is lifeless?
Look where we’re heading as regard to pollution (to which all our engines are not a little factor) and ask yourself: would have we known what we know today, was this ‘inevitable’ path we decided to follow (ultimately it was a choice, nothing more: the choice of using much cheap(er) energy and workforce as a way to gain more power/money faster) was it really the smartest one? Or should we have tried to follow another less obvious path but maybe less destructive? Destructive, like AI is in regard to the OP question but it obviously is not limited to AI.
That’s one of the most glaring lie (not yours, I mean it in a general way) in regard to tech: criticizing it or one of its form is not being ‘against tech’. It’s a critic of tech and/or a refusal of a certain type of tech. The choice is not between '‘using tech’ and ‘being a caveman’. It’s about questioning the way we use tech (to do what? Do we really need machines to do creative work?), how we control it (who decide what it’s allowed to do and how it is trained), and who owns it (who get all the money? Not the artists they were trained upon, obviously). And who controls all of that?
Also, keep in mind that exactly like AI or the smartphone are considered ‘high tech’ today, the horse and the cart were also considered high-tech back in their days. Do you think their users were hostile to tech? I don’t think so ;)
Interesting thought about the lie, I guess sometimes it’s hard to determine what is a criticism against a use case of a tech and what is criticism against the tech itself.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s perfectly fine to criticize ‘the tech itself’. What would you say about a tech that would allow a government or anyone for that matter to read your most intimate thoughts just by pointing some devise toward you? Would you be ok for that tech to be used (hoping that it will be used only against ‘perverts’ and ‘terrorists’… to punish them for crimes they have not yet committed, making them guilty of… nothing) but knowing perfectly well that so much that such a tool will be used against the entire population because as the saying goes:
What I’m saying is that it’s not being hostile to it to criticize something. It’s not because one criticizes something (tech, or whatever) that someone wants that thing to be gone. To criticize something is to consider its merits and faults, that’s all it is. It’s pointing out strengths and weaknesses. It’s not blaming or crying. For example, chemo is a great (tech and) therapy that saves many lives all year long but should it not be constantly criticized in order to make it better than it is? Say, to make it less painful and less destructive (which it is) to the patients being treated by it? Of course, it should. That’s criticism. And that’s why scientists are constantly trying to improve it (and labs too, but then they’re also motivated by increasing their stocks value ;)
What I’m not saying is that if something can be done (tech, AI, thoughts reading, whatever) that something should be done no question asked and that the rest of us (all of humanity and, in our present situation, the entire ecosystem of our planet) will just have to deal with the consequences and fuck us all. Once again, see my (silly?) thought-reading example.
I’m saying that it should be discussed. I know it won’t (the perspective of becoming ‘Musk-like’ rich and powerful can seldom be resisted). It never was. It probably never will be. But I still think it should be discussed because we ought to be less stupid than we always have been (stakes are much higher than ever), we ought it if not to ourselves to the next generations. I mean, I would not want to be a 10 or even a 20 year-old today when I see what’s to be expected in the following decades. Heck, for the last 20 years or so my spouse and I were pretty sure we would have passed away long before shit really start hitting the fan, we’re not so sure of that anymore.