You can self-host an artificial neural network, just like you can self-publish a book, but that’s not where the money is. The AIs that most people are using are owned by corporations, just like the distribution channels for selling books are owned by corporations. That means the efficiency gains won’t be passed on to the consumer. They’ll let you play with it as first, while they gain market share, but pretty soon it’ll back to the capitalist norm. When you publish an epic poem using ChatGPT 7 and make a million dollars, OpenAI will just sue you, and say their AI made the work so they deserve the money. Something like that will happen, and it’ll go back to normal, just with the corporations that own the capital making even more money.

Why do you think we’re still working 40 hours a week, despite all the gains in efficiency from technology over the past century? Wait, scratch that. Women entered the workforce, so now the average household works 80 hours a week when they used to work 40. We’re working twice as much, even though technology made us 10 times as productive. Why aren’t we all doing 2 hour workweeks like in The Jetsons? Well, Karl Marx predicted that this would happen, because the owning class has the capital, and we live in a capitalist system. The gains in efficiency only benefit the capital holders. You work twice as much to produce 20 times the wealth, and all that wealth just goes to some rich guy sipping martinis on a megayacht. Even if you work for a small business, the big ones just use their market dominance to squeeze your boss and get the wealth you produced anyway. Technology won’t save us. We need to fundamentally restructure our economic system, so ownership is no longer equivalent to control.