For good or bad, there are always those who are reluctant to adapt to change.
We used to call them "conservative" although many of those have now devolved into extremism.
If you're trying to suggest that people who don't like GenAI's use of stolen intellectual property are in any way similar to political conservatives and extremists, it won't wash. Objecting to people's work being stolen for profit that goes mostly to a few companies is in no way conservative.
This is not about the tech per se. This is not about change in general. But many changes are harmful and should be opposed.
GenAI works because of its datasets. The larger they are, the better it works. The better quality of what's in those datasets, the better it works. That's why AI companies have been desperate to steal as much valuable intellectual property as they can.
They don't care who gets hurt by what they're doing. They're hoping to get away with it. Some of the AI companies have terms of service making individual users, who do NOT know what's in the dataset, fully legally liable if the company is sued for their AI spitting out something that clearly violates the intellectual property rights of someone whose IP they stole.
People using GenAI tend to either be ignorant that the datasets are usually stolen, or they don't care that they were stolen because the GenAI benefits them in some way that they feel is more important than the harm GenAI does. Some of those people are openly gleeful about artists and workers being harmed. Those peopls tend to be RWers or libertarians. I saw a lot of RWers online during the writers and actors strikes last year rooting for those damn Hollywood liberals to go broke, for AI to replace all their jobs. I've also seen a lot of posts from GenAI users showing resentment of professional artists as entitled elitists who should be brought down by AI, and some of the same GenAI users also complain that they aren't viewed as real artists and can't copyright their work and even their prompts, which they consider valuable intellectual property that should be legally protected even though the AI's dataset is stolen. (And never mind that the same prompt, given to an AI model again and again, can churn out an almost infinite series of different options as it follows algorithms mindlessly.)
There are some people who are uncomfortable with the fact that the datasets are stolen, who prefer to repeat GenAI companies' claims that this was fair use, or that the IP taken was "publicly available" (a term they're using more and more since they know a lot of people will confuse it with "public domain" ). Or those people will tell themselves that it's new technology and has to be accepted.
That ship has sailed, as you said.
The cat's out of the bag. Etc., ad infinitum. Telling yourself that is comforting if you want to have something that others say was stolen. Or you can call the giant copyright problem
a gray area, as you did in your other thread. But AI companies aren't trying to keep what's in their datasets secret, or putting indemnification clauses in their TOS, or lobbying governments to change laws or make AI exempt, because it's a gray area. They know their GenAI works because of theft.
I know it can be tempting to use GenAI, at least as a toy. But if you post about using it, you're essentially advertising for those companies. Some of which have TOS requiring you to mention the company's name if you use it for free and post their output online. You might be inspiring others to use GenAI, but GenAI isn't real creativity. It's actually closer to shopping online using keywords, typing in the item, style, color, etc. that you want. You choose from the options the AI offers you.
You can have fun choosing from those AI options. But in the meantime, real artists have been hurt. Aspiring artists have been discouraged and switched majors, seeing AI crushing or likely to crush their dreams. Platforms like deviantArt and Kindle are being flooded by GenAI output uploaded by people who themse!ves have no interest in art or writing, but think using AI to generate stuff quickly is a great way to make a few bucks. GenAI is not in any way a good thing for artists and creativity.
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