Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant mulitnational corporations for the right to bleed us out.
The point is that these big companies have enough money to get permission from whoever they want, so we’ll still end up with proprietary models destroying industries, but only the big corpos will be able to use this tech effectively and everyone else will have to beg. A future like the 70s where the only OS’ and programming languages were proprietary, or the 90s where all the DBs were proprietary. A paradigm where a powerful tech (good or not) is only available to the rich or for rent, is never a good one.
Yeah but this presumes “the best way to beat 'em is to join 'em,” right? Like, when all the operating systems or databases are proprietary, that’s bad because those things are really useful and help you do things better and faster than you would otherwise.
But this argument applied here is like, oh no, what if large entertainment companies start making all their movies out of AI garbage, and everyone else can’t do that because they can’t get the content licensed? Well… what if they do? Does that mean they’re going to be making stuff that’s better? Wouldn’t the best way to compete with that be not to use the technology because you’ll get a higher-quality product? Or are we just giving up on the idea of producing good art at all and conceding that yes we actually only value cheapness and quantity?
Also, just on a personal level, for me as a J. Random Person who uploads creative work to the internet (some of which is in common crawl), but who doesn’t work for a major entertainment corporation that has rights to my work, I would really prefer to have a way to say “sorry no, you can’t use my stuff for this.” I don’t really find “well you see, we need to be able to compete with large entertainment companies in spam content generation, so we need to be able to use your uncompensated labor for our benefit without your permission and without crediting you” particularly compelling.
The point is that this tech is not only made for one reason (replacing artists and authors etc). It has plenty of other valid uses, such as an assistant, a sex toy, personal entertainment etc and probably a lot we don’t know due to how young it is. I don’t want to pre-emptively see all the valid uses locked-in to proprietary models and everyone becoming a serf to openAI to use them.
Call me radical, but I don’t agree that anyone should have the right to tell others how to use their creative work. If you share it, it’s out of your hands. All culture is a remix and has always been this way until the last 120 years. Copyright and Patents have always been a mistake and should be abolished as they achieved the opposite of what they promised.
Haha, sounds like we might have to agree to disagree on this one.
Copyright is much older than 1904, though! It dates back to the printing press, when it became necessary because the new technology made it possible to benefit off writers’ work without compensating them, which made it hard to be a writer as a profession, even though we want people to be able to do that as a society. Hey, wait a minute…
I happen to copyright my output (obviously not here or in other comments). The question I ask myself is: would I be ok if a Nazi organization used my photos in their propaganda? I’m not ok with that, so I like to retain control over who can use my stuff. If someone acceptable were to ask me, I’d let them use my work without compensation.
