What? Have you ever paid for a book? a subscription to a publishing medium of any sort, a movie or a piece of music? Have you noticed a copyright sign somewhere? Is that arrangement of recognizing and rewarding those who create something worthwhile part of the real world or not? Not even a hallucinating AI would be so incongruous.
You might be shocked, but automation replaced humans in all those industries.
I'll still pay for books, music, or whatever. I won't really care at which capacity they were AI generated.
So? To the extend that people are still involved, they are typically paid - unless it is slave labor, that is.
This is not an automation vs manual labor debate. Creators will use any technology that helps them create something worthwhile. It may even involve algorithms in various ways. Generative art was a thing way before the AI bro invasion.
The question is about provenance, attribution and remuneration of whatever human work and creativity is involved in producing unique pieces of work. Work that is used as input for the algorithmic production of infinite variations and replicas.
The AI crowd simply wants to devalue that human input (while pressumably charging for API's or whatever comes on the other side of the meat grinder).
Which I suppose might happen in an increasingly dystopic world, but they seem to also believe that people will keep embarking on literary studies, movie or music making studies etc. as some sort of non-remunerative hobby, just to keep producing useful inputs for the AI models.
Its not going to happen. The golden goose will be dead before you can spell "AI".
I mean, I would love to live in a world where UBI was a thing, and people were free to pursue their interests without fear of homelessness or starvation. Capitalism is a system that requires an underbelly of people exploited through the coercion inherent to the inequality of the world.
That is an utopia, however. The reality is that most people - including yours truly - sell their labor to make ends meet. It certainly was not my lifelong dream to do backend development for a financial institution.
Your friend (and many others in this thread) operate under a naive and entitled assumption that their creative output should be enshrined as something special, whereas throughout history technology always replaced human capacity, and we are better for it.
