FaceDeer

"Slamming" has definitely been enshittified.

Better art and poetry than most humans can produce.

I'm not talking about the article specifically, just a general class of reaction I've seen.

And yet it's writing poetry and painting pictures. That makes it worse, doesn't it? Turns out you don't have to be very intelligent to do those things.

It invariably comes from exploiting the efforts of others to their deteriment

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.

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.

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.

Humans are animals, so that seems fine to me.

I've seen a lot of reaction to AI that smacks of some kind of species-level narcissism, IMO. Lots of people have grown up being told how special humans were and how there were certain classes of things that were "uniquely human" that no machine could ever do, and now they're being confronted with the notion that that's just not the case. The psychological impact of AI could be just as distressing as the economic impact, it's going to be some interesting times ahead.

What happens when the VC money runs out and the price skyrockets and takes it out of your reach?

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.

but I am not happy making someone obscenely rich.

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.

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.

Worrying about being "caught up in capitalism" on the one hand, and then later in the same sentence wanting to be paid for idle conversation with your fellow man?

I'm really starting to get a bit worried about this seemingly increasing assumption that every single little particle of our lives needs to be monetized. People fret about how a few words the write on some random social media site might end up being used to train an AI, that might end up being used to do some little task, that ends up being worth a pittance to someone. "Where's the fraction of a pittance that I am entitled to?" People demand. "I'm going to use scripts to delete all my old comments, I'm going to switch to different social media platforms, I'll quit posting on the Internet entirely if I can't get my fraction of a pittance!"

Whatever happened to just doing stuff because it was fun, or because being helpful was the right thing to do, and not worrying about how to prevent other people from somehow making a sliver of a penny off of it without recompense? Why care that someone might be able to find some way to make a tiny little bit of money off of it?

Those products exist. There are plenty of AI products that don't involve ads at all, you pay for a service that uses AI to help do whatever it is the service is about (for example GitHub Copilot). There are open source products that give you those services for free, even.

Some people use those services to create advertising, but it's not like advertising is the only field that this stuff is useful for.

You're not going to stop hearing about AI. Perhaps AI companies won't be so high-profile, but AI itself is being integrated into lots of things and it's not going to go away. The only thing that's happened here is that it's proving to be not quite so profitable as expected being an AI-specific company.

Edit: Perhaps not even that, the article appears to be neglecting to mention that this is part of a trend across the whole stock market rather than something AI-specific.