I mean, sure, you can always not talk about or suggest them, but so much of what you’re dealing with day to day is probably from some big business. Also I am aware of the concept of universal basic income, but I’ve not really seen it framed/discussed from this sort of perspective, which imo at least is morbidly funnier.
At any rate, capitalists made this market where time’s money and ya always gotta be hustling, so if they think they’re owed free word o’ mouth, well, who’s all entitled then, eh?
I’m not harmed by someone making billions based in some tiny way on a bit of text I wrote once upon a time. It doesn’t take any money away from me, and I couldn’t have used that text to do it myself so I’m not missing out. And I get to use those AIs, too, which I am already finding is improving my life significantly.
You get to pay for those AIs, at whatever price they decide is suitable. It may be “free” now, but its naive to assume it will remain that way. What happens when the VC money runs out and the price skyrockets and takes it out of your reach?
Fortunately, there are many open source models you can fall back on, which brings me back to my point: If my work is taken to build a model, I want to be able to use that model, without lining someone elses pockets. Im even happy to pay for their expenses in developing and running the service, but I am not happy making someone obscenely rich.
You answer that in your next paragraph. There are lots of open source models available, some of which are almost as good as the top proprietary models. That’s almost exclusively what I use myself; I’ve got Koboldcpp and Automatic1111 installed on my computer and I mostly use those for my image and text manipulation needs.
Which brings me right back to the comment you’re responding to. Why aren’t you happy making someone obscenely rich when it doesn’t cost you anything in the process?
A lot of people seem to fundamentally see the world as a zero-sum game. If someone else is getting rich then they feel like that must be making them poorer somehow. But that’s not how the world actually works. It’s entirely possible to create value without taking it away from someone else. When people invent new ways to make valuable products from worthless raw materials those products represent an increase of value in the world as a whole, the production of those products doesn’t make anyone poorer. It annoys me when people get mad that that’s happening.
Obscene wealth doesnt come from nowhere. It invariably comes from exploiting the efforts of others to their deteriment (even if that deteriment is immeasurably small).
The text that is being used to train models has a value, even if you believe yours does not. Others have spent huge amounts of money and effort educating themselves so that they can create articles, papers, literature, and even internet comments, which is then being used in these models.
So yeah, I guess I do see it as a zero sum game. In order for an exchange to be positive sum, both parties need to agree to the exchange. We do not get any choice in the exchange.
I think we fundamentally disagree here, and I have said enough. I am glad you are happy with the way things are, I wish I could feel the same way.
But that just isn’t so. Sometimes it can be true, but not invariably so. If an inventor comes up with a new invention and then sells it to people who want to buy the invention for the price that he’s selling it at (due to it providing them greater utility than the price he’s charging - that’s basic economics), then who has suffered any detriment in any of this? The inventor made money. The customers got the thing that they wanted. Nobody lost anything, and some people gained in the process.
Again, simply not true. I can think of all sorts of scenarios where a forced exchange could wind up with both parties benefiting. That’s not to say that any arbitrary forced exchange would be beneficial, of course, obviously not. But saying that it cannot happen can be easily disproved by counterexample.
This isn’t just an “agree to disagree” thing. The people raging about how ChatGPT et al somehow “stole” their Reddit shitposts and now think they’re owed money are trying to shut ChatGPT et al down. Huge swaths of intellectual property are sitting fallow because the people that own the rights aren’t doing anything with it but darned if they’ll let anyone else do something with it instead. It’s a destructive mindset, and not just for the people feeling it. It harms society as a whole.