> Saying "well you have to follow the market" is such a cravenly amoral perspective.

You only have to follow the market if you want to continue to stay relevant.

Taking a stand and refusing to follow the market is always an option, but it might mean going out of business for ideological reasons.

So practically speaking, the options are follow the market or find a different line of work if you don’t like the way the market is going.

No, of course you don't have to – but don't torture yourself. If the market is all AI, and you are a service provider that does not want to work with AI at all then get out of the business.

If you found it unacceptable to work with companies that used any kind of digital database (because you found centralization of information and the amount of processing and analytics this enables unbecoming) then you should probably look for another venture instead of finding companies that commit to pen and paper.

Yeah but the business seems to be education for web front end. If you are going to shun new tech you should really return to the printing press or better copying scribes. If you are going to do modern tech you kind of need to stick with the most modern tech.

I understand this stance, but I'd personally differentiate between taking the moral stand as a consumer, where you actively become part of the growth in demmand that fuels further investment, and as a contractor, where you're a temporary cost, especially if you and people who depend on you necessitate it to survive.

A studio taking on temporary projects isn't investing into AI— they're not getting paid in stock. This is effectively no different from a construction company building an office building, or a bakery baking a cake.

As a more general commentary, I find this type of moral crusade very interesting, because it's very common in the rich western world, and it's always against the players but rarely against the system. I wish more people in the rich world would channel this discomfort as general disdain for the neoliberal free-market of which we're all victims, not just specifically AI, for example.

The problem isn't AI. The problem is a system where new technology means millions fearing poverty. Or one where profits, regardless of industry, matter more than sustainability. Or one where rich players can buy their way around the law— in this case copyright law for example. AI is just the latest in a series of products, companies, characters, etc. that will keep abusing an unfair system.

IMO over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific players like this and not the game as a whole is a distraction bound to always bring disappointment, and bound to keep moral players at a disadvantage constantly second-guessing themselves.

Its cravenly amoral until your children are hungry. The market doesn't care about your morals. You either have a product people are willing to pay money for or you don't. If you are financially independent to the point it doesn't matter to you then by all means, do what you want. The vast majority of people are not.

nobody is against his moral stance. the problem is that he’s playing the “principled stand” game on a budget that cannot sustain it, then externalizing the cost like a victim. if you're a millionaire and can hold whatever moral line you want without ever worrying about rent, food, healthcare, kids, etc. then "selling out" is optional and bad. if you're joe schmoe with a mortgage and 5 months of emergency savings, and you refuse the main kind of work people want to pay you for (which is not even that controversial), you’re not some noble hero, you’re just blowing up your life.

I'm not sure I understand this view. Did seamstresses see sewing machines as amoral? Or carpenters with electric and air drills and saws?

AI is another set of tooling. It can be used well or not, but arguing the morality of a tooling type (e.g drills) vs maybe a specific company (e.g Ryobi) seems an odd take to me.

I find this very generic what you are saying and they.

What stance against AI? Image generation is not the same as code generation.

There are so many open source projects out there, its a huge difference than taking all the images.

AI is also just ML so should i not use image bounding box algorithm? Am i not allowed to take training data online or are only big companies not allowed to?