AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

An idea that has been living rent free in my head is that "AI is ultimately nothing but a pure destruction of value". It's promise is unlimited value to everyone on demand; but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable. Value and scarcity go hand in hand.

I realize the hyperbolic framing of the idea, but none-the-less I haven't been able to get it out of my head. This article feels like it's another piece of the same puzzle.

AI is getting way too much credit in this article.

There are much much bigger forces that impact society in the way the author describes.

I feel a lot less pride in my creative work knowing it can be done much too easily with modern AI. It makes me less eager to create which is quite unfortunate.

I haven’t felt to bad about my creative works being fed into training models. Taken by itself, my creations are minuscule. But it’s very apparent when I look at AI as a whole, having taken from everyone in aggregate.

I feel that.

AI could be a boon for mankind. it can be a useful tool. We could employ it in a manner which provides more dignity for workers. That is, let them work less hours, have more leisure time etc. That necessitates something which will keep the powers of capital in check, and people don't seem to think that this is possible.

Corporations are just so large and powerful, that people feel hopeless. Byt we could still get together and enact legislation which will override them. Othing is impossible, it just takes some imagination and organisation.

Like Chomsky once said, if the peasants of Haiti could organise and overthrow their government and create a functioning democracy, then surely we can too, with far more advantages.

> Right now, even people who reject meritocracy understand its logic. You develop rare skills, you work hard, you create value, and you capture some of that value.

The premise is that AI does not allow to do this any more, which is completely false. It may not allow to do it in the same way, so its true that some jobs may disappear, but others will be created.

The article is too alarmist by someone who has drank all of the corporate hype. AI is not AGI. AI is an automation tool, like any other that we have invented before. The cool thing is that now we can use natural language as a programming language which was not possible before. If you treat AI as something that can thin k, you will fail again and again. If you treat it as an automation tool, that cannot think you will get all of the benefits.

Here i am talking about work. Of course AI has introduced a new scale of AI slop, and that has other psycological impacts on society.

I think that a lot of people are fine with intellectual property theft because most of people don’t have much valuable intellectual property.

No one steals from them.

So far AI companies were settling by throwing VC cash at it so the vocal ones that do have IP will be paid off.

Perhaps sovereign compute is the answer? We have open weights models, as a sort of ‘public commons’ that democratises that layer, but compute is still the bottleneck for big companies..

It seems the public is getting tired of these AI slops. No one wants "AI powered" products. How long will the bubble last?

Feels like AI is speed-running us straight into last man (antithesis of Übermensch), where the algorithms make the values and we’re just the training data.

In the past few decades, I learned to be skeptical of any piece of "true" media because it could be easily be photoshopped by an expert. Yet people still gave credence to a damning photo or soundbite shared around. AI has finally made it so easy to fake things that (I hope) people will re-learn skepticism of all they see/hear.

Likewise, I've felt like the meritocracy story that the author sets up as the "moral foundation" has heavily attenuated in this century. It's still used as the justification in America (I'm rich because I deserve it, you're not rich because you didn't work as hard/smart as me) but it feels like that story is wearing thin. Or that the relative proportion of the luck / ovarian lottery aspect has become so much larger than the skill+hard work aspect.

The trend of the rich getting richer, of them using their power to manipulate the system to further advantage them and theirs at the expense of everyone else, existed before AI burst into the public in '20-21. Maybe, like the fake media, it will finally be the kick people need to let go of the meritocracy trap* and realize we need a change.

* I like the notion of meritocracy, it just seems like America has moved from aiming for that, to using the story of it as an excuse to or opiate for the masses.

No it doesn't, because social media already did that. There's nothing left to be broken.

Modern society has no moral foundation.

This argument depends on the idea that someone’s creative work output being used for AI training somehow deprives them of benefit from that creative work output - the basic idea behind “copyright infringement is stealing”. This is not to agree that AI training is copyright infringement, just that it depends on the same concept of intellectual property.

I don’t subscribe to this basic idea. Copyrights are a legal fiction designed to prop up an industry. Somehow from that we went to the idea that creative work output is property. It isn’t. It’s a service. This is why “works made for hire” is a thing.

This is the same reason that reasonable people don’t believe that fanfic authors should be jailed.

This piece is wildly optimistic about the outcomes likely from AI on par with the smartest humans, let alone smarter than that. The author seems to think that widespread disbelief in the legitimacy of the system could make a difference, in such a world.

This stuff is all a bit much. Fan fiction sites are all “creative content lifted without your consent”. You think J K Rowling consented to Harry x Hermione slash fiction? Or Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality? Absolutely non-consensual.

All of this stuff is clearly a highly cherry-picked gymnastic exercise to justify a pre-existing position. Classic Elephant and Rider stuff.

It’s the same as support for the snail darter. Same as the story about how groups shouldn’t go out during COVID but BLM protests are fine. And if by some incredible chance it had been the FSF or Brewster Kahle who had produced GPT then you guys would be talking about how information should be unchained because creative work belongs to all Man.

Couching this blatantly motivated reasoning by quoting past philosophers is just such middle-brow woe-is-me whining. Take one look at yourselves in an honest sense. Do you have any principles or will you slave them all to your outcomes?

And now I must repeat the litany lest one assume that my opposition to this kind of balderdash be construed as some kind of political tribalism:

* I don’t think we should destroy endangered species

* I think COVID wasn’t a hoax and does spread in large groups

* I think people have a right to protest if they are discriminated against and that includes the black people at BLM

* I love the Internet Archive and have donated to them

What philosophical foundations are left? Even at the very top the president is corrupt and morally depraved.

I opened 10 PRs in 20 minutes today and it felt great. If I extrapolate that to everything else with a straight line then everything looks good /s