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jillesvangurptoday at 12:19 PM5 repliesview on HN

Only in exactly the same sense that portrait painters were robbed of their income by the invention of photography. In the end people adapted and some people still paint. Just not a whole lot of portraits. Because people now take selfies.

Authors still get recognition. If they are decent authors producing original, literary work. But the type of author that fills page five of your local news paper, has not been valued for decades. But that was filler content long before AI showed up. Same for the people that do the subtitles on soap operas. The people that create the commercials that show at 4am on your TV. All fair game for AI.

It's not a heist, just progress. People having to adapt and struggling with that happens with most changes. That doesn't mean the change is bad. Projecting your rage, moralism, etc. onto agents of change is also a constant. People don't like change. The reason we still talk about Luddites is that they overreacted a bit.

People might feel that time is treating them unfairly. But the reality is that sometimes things just change and then some people adapt and others don't. If your party trick is stuff AIs do well (e.g. translating text, coming up with generic copy text, adding some illustrations to articles, etc.), then yes AI is robbing you of your job and there will be a lot less demand for doing these things manually. And maybe you were really good at it even. That really sucks. But it happened. That cat isn't going back in the bag. So, deal with it. There are plenty of other things people can still do.

You are no different than that portrait painter in the 1800s that suddenly saw their market for portraits evaporate because they were being replaced by a few seconds exposure in front of a camera. A lot of very decent art work was created after that. It did not kill art. But it did change what some artists did for a living. In the same way, the gramophone did not kill music. The TV did not kill theater. Etc.

Getting robbed implies a sense of entitlement to something. Did you own what you lost to begin with?


Replies

jimbokuntoday at 5:06 PM

The claim of theft is simple: the AI companies stole intellectual property without attribution. Knowing how AIs are trained and seeing the content they produce, I'm not sure how you can dispute that.

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BenGosubtoday at 2:13 PM

it's not the "exactly same sense". If an AI generated website is based on a real website, it's not like photography and painting, it is the same craft being compared.

dripdry45today at 2:05 PM

But DID the Luddites overreact? They sought to have machines serve people instead of the other way around.

If they had succeeded in regulation over machines and seeing wealth back into the average factory worker’s hands, of artisans integrated into the workforce instead of shut out, would so much of the bloodshed and mayhem to form unions and regulations have been needed?

Broadly, it seems to me that most technological change could use some consideration of people

BenGosubtoday at 3:31 PM

It's also important that most of AI content created is slop. On this website most people stand against AI generated writing slop. Also, trust me, you don't want a world where most music is AI generated, it's going to drive you crazy. So, it's not like photography and painting it is like comparing good and shitty quality content.

wizzwizz4today at 1:58 PM

Photography takes pictures of objects, not of paintings. By shifting the frame to "robbed of their income", you completely miss the point of the criticism you're responding to… but I suspect that's deliberate.

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