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0 pointsJohnHaugeland1y ago0 comments

> Stealing is not the right word perhaps, but it is bad, and this should be obvious.

Many people say things that they don't like "should be obvious"ly bad. If you can't say why, that's almost always because it actually isn't.

Have a look at almost any human rights push for examples.

> For piracy, take switch games.

It's a bad metaphor.

With piracy, someone is taking a thing that was on the market for money, and using it without paying for it. They are selling something that belongs to other people. The creator loses potential income.

Here, nobody is actually doing that. The correct metaphor is a library. A creator is going and using content to learn to do other creation, then creating and selling novel things. The original creators aren't out money at all.

Every time this has gone to court, the courts have calmly explained that for this to be theft, first something has to get stolen.

> If something is OK if only very, very few people do it

This is okay no matter how many people do it.

The reason that people feel the need to set up these complex explanatory metaphors based on "well under these circumstances" is that they can't give a straight answer what's bad here. Just talk about who actually gets harmed, in clear unambiguous detail.

Watch how easy it is with real crimes.

Murder is bad because someone dies without wanting to.

Burglary is bad because objects someone owns are taken, because someone loses home safety, and because there's a risk of violence

Fraud is bad because someone gets cheated after being lied to.

Then you try that here. AI is bad because some rich people I don't like got a bunch of content together and trained a piece of software to make new content and even though nobody is having anything taken away from them it's theft, and even though nobody's IP is being abused it's copyright infringement, and even though nobody's losing any money or opportunities this is bad somehow and that should be obvious, and ignore the 60 million people who can now be artists because I saw this guy on twitter who yelled a lot

Like. Be serious

This has been through international courts almost 200 times at this point. This has been through American courts more than 70 times, but we're also bound by all the rest thanks to the Berne conventions.

Every. Single. Court. Case. Has. Said. This. Is. Fine. In. Every. Single. Country.

Zero exceptions. On the entire planet for five years and counting, every single court has said "well no, this is explicitly fine."

Matthew Butterick, the lawyer that got a bunch of Hollywood people led by Sarah Silverman to try to sue over this? The judge didn't just throw out his lawsuit. He threatened to end Butterick's career for lying to the celebrities.

That's the position you're taking right now.

We've had these laws in place since the 1700s, thanks to collage. They've been hard ratified in the United States for 150 years thanks to libraries.

> Everyone recycling? Good! Everyone reducing their beef consumption? Good! ... everyone pirating...?

This is just silly. "Recycling is good and eating other things is good, but let's try piracy, and by the way, I'm just sort of asserting this, there's nothing to support any of this."

For the record, the courts have been clear: there is no piracy occurring here. Piracy would be if Meta gave you the book collection.

> In the context of humanity and pushing this to it's limits, we can't even begin to comprehend the consequences.

That's nice. This same non-statement is used to push back against medicine, gender theory, nuclear power, yadda yadda.

The human race is not going to stop doing things because you choose to declare it incomprehensible.

> I'm talking crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams.

Yeah, we're actually discussing Midjourney, here.

You can't put a description to any of these crimes against humanity. This is just melodrama.

> If you don't know what I'm talking about,

I don't, and neither do you.

"I'm talking really big stuff! If you don't know what it is, you didn't think hard enough."

Yeah, sure. Can you give even one credible example of Midjourney committing, and I quote, "crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams?"

Like. You're seriously trying to say that a picture making robot is about to get dragged in front of the Hague?

Sometimes I wonder if anti-AI people even realize how silly they sound to others

0 comments

consteval1y ago

> The creator loses potential income

Okay. AI books make books 1 million times faster, let's say. Arbitrary, pick any number.

If I, a consumer, want a book, I am therefore 1 million times more likely to pick an AI book. Finding a "real" book takes insurmountable effort. This is the "needle in a haystack" I mentioned earlier.

The result is obvious - creators look potential money. And yes, it is actually obvious. If it isn't, reread it a few times.

To be perfectly and abundantly clear because I think you're purposefully misunderstanding me - I know AI is not piracy. I know that. It's, like, the second sentence I wrote. I said those words explicitly.

I am arguing that while it is not piracy, the harm it creates it identical in form to piracy. In your words, "creators lose potential income". If that is the standard, you must agree with me.

> how silly they sound to others

I'm not silly, you're just naive and fundamentally misunderstand how our societies work.

Capitalism is founded on one very big assumption. It is the jenga block keeping everything together.

Everyone must work. You don't work, you die. Nobody works, everyone dies.

Up until now, this assumption has been sound. The "edge cases", like children and disabled people, we've been able to bandaid with money we pool from everyone - what you know as taxes.

But consider what happens if this fundamental assumption no longer holds true. Products need consumers as much as consumers need products - it's a circular relationship. To make things you need money, to make money you must sell things, to buy things you must have money, and to have money you must make things. If you outsource the making things, there's no money - period. For anyone. Everyone dies. Or, more likely, the country collapses into a socialist revolution. Depending on what country this is, the level of bloodiness varies.

This has happened in the past already, with much more primitive technologies. FDR, in his capitalist genius, very narrowly prevented the US from falling into the socialist revolution with some aforementioned bandaid solutions - what we call "The New Deal". The scale at which we're talking about now is much larger, and the consequences more drastic. I am not confident another "New Deal" can be constructed, let alone implemented. And, I'm not confident it would prevent the death spiral. Again, we cut it very, very close last time.

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