As someone who simultaneously makes music professionally, and works in IT professionally, it has been really interesting watching GenAI unfold, and the diverging cultures around it. It is almost like the world is splitting into two "societies":

1. One that loves AI + Big Business + very fast Innovation and disruption

2. One that loves Artisanal work + Small Business + slower but more sustainable innovation

I personally prefer living in #2, but I can totally see both "societies" continuing to exist and develop in their own ways.

Of course there is always the reality that different societies always end up interacting and affecting eachother.

As someone (like other who have posted) who has made my living my whole life making art/ code, this is completely wrong!

What it threatened is the ad based "content" models where you put stuff up for free and sell ads against it. There's lots of ways to make money from any creative endeavor that has a lasting audience. I don't know if that includes talking into your phone or writing a personal journal about productivity hacks.

Things you make that are really good: a novel, a game, a short film, a song are still very valuable.

Needs to be inverted.

Tax excess tech profits that derive from the efforts of others and use the proceeds to fund living artists.

Vaguely analogous to levies on blank cassettes that went to offset piracy. Give the money directly to actual artists, not labels/publishers, though.

At least for art - I don't think you'll find anyone who actually enjoys art hanging up anything produced by AI on their walls. For these kinds of "customers", they could equally easily frame & hang up a poster of the Mona Lisa. Artists are not at threat, if anything, AI makes original artworks more precious & enjoyable.

There seem to be two possibilities:

1. AI can't do some things humans can, and that doesn't change.

2. AI turns into something that can do everything. Humans become unnecessary.

We're currently at #1. Google may want to keep you in their AI playpen so all your clicks can be monetized directly to them, but they still need the data humans are creating. They're just not paying for it.

In world #1, humans will get less work, but creative and original work will still be valued because AI can't do it. There will, of course, need to be support for all the people striving to create such work while they're gaining the skills to do so. In world #2, humans are getting no work. Neither one of these worlds functions if all the proceeds of work go to a small number of billionaires. Wealth will need to be redistributed so people can live and, if still necessary, do the things AI can't.

Regulations need to catch up with what Google is trying to do here. It's currently theft and, even if we reach the point where they no longer need to crawl the web for input to their AI, their wealth will need to be redistributed. Sucking the entirety of human knowledge into a LLM and then profiting off of it without paying the humans who created that knowledge is not a business model that can remain legal for long.

I imagine it'll take a functional legal body to do this IE maybe europe, but I think there should be a legally binding set of metadata you can attach to images to specify that they must not be used for training (with real penalties if companies are caught)

The rhetoric of this comment seems to imply that this is a bad thing, but is it really? If it becomes more difficult to make money through creative endeavors, then that leaves us with fewer reasons to be creative other than for the sake of self-expression... which is what we want, right?

This is hyperscale remix culture. AI is an accelerant. Find things that cannot be accelerated!

I would assume the publishing industry loves this.

No money and no audience.

Recognition and gratitude keeps me going. Money pays the bills, but if that was the only concern, I'd still be a software developer.

Anonymously feeding the slop machine is nothing like it.

I’m itching for some sort of no-training license:

This content must not be used for training or refining generative AI. If it is, rest assured that if and when the regulatory environment around training data shifts in any country where we have legal standing, we will pursue legal action.

Maybe even with a class action element: any lawsuit stemming from a violation of this license shall cover all other violations at the same time.

A big corporation using LLM’s to pump out lazy “art” gets the exact same scrutiny from me.