I mean, sure, you can always not talk about or suggest them, but so much of what you’re dealing with day to day is probably from some big business. Also I am aware of the concept of universal basic income, but I’ve not really seen it framed/discussed from this sort of perspective, which imo at least is morbidly funnier.
At any rate, capitalists made this market where time’s money and ya always gotta be hustling, so if they think they’re owed free word o’ mouth, well, who’s all entitled then, eh?
Worrying about being “caught up in capitalism” on the one hand, and then later in the same sentence wanting to be paid for idle conversation with your fellow man?
I’m really starting to get a bit worried about this seemingly increasing assumption that every single little particle of our lives needs to be monetized. People fret about how a few words the write on some random social media site might end up being used to train an AI, that might end up being used to do some little task, that ends up being worth a pittance to someone. “Where’s the fraction of a pittance that I am entitled to?” People demand. “I’m going to use scripts to delete all my old comments, I’m going to switch to different social media platforms, I’ll quit posting on the Internet entirely if I can’t get my fraction of a pittance!”
Whatever happened to just doing stuff because it was fun, or because being helpful was the right thing to do, and not worrying about how to prevent other people from somehow making a sliver of a penny off of it without recompense? Why care that someone might be able to find some way to make a tiny little bit of money off of it?
In abstract, that is a very valid way to look at it. But the “someone else” making money in these situations is often making billions, not some tiny amount.
Specifically for the AI stuff, i would be perfectly happy giving away my “work”, if I knew the obscene amounts of money generated were going to actually flow (flow, not trickle) back to the broader community (via taxes, welfare programs etc). Instead I suspect a few more billionaires will be minted, and life for the rest of us wont improve much if at all.
I’m not harmed by someone making billions based in some tiny way on a bit of text I wrote once upon a time. It doesn’t take any money away from me, and I couldn’t have used that text to do it myself so I’m not missing out. And I get to use those AIs, too, which I am already finding is improving my life significantly.
You get to pay for those AIs, at whatever price they decide is suitable. It may be “free” now, but its naive to assume it will remain that way. What happens when the VC money runs out and the price skyrockets and takes it out of your reach?
Fortunately, there are many open source models you can fall back on, which brings me back to my point: If my work is taken to build a model, I want to be able to use that model, without lining someone elses pockets. Im even happy to pay for their expenses in developing and running the service, but I am not happy making someone obscenely rich.
You answer that in your next paragraph. There are lots of open source models available, some of which are almost as good as the top proprietary models. That’s almost exclusively what I use myself; I’ve got Koboldcpp and Automatic1111 installed on my computer and I mostly use those for my image and text manipulation needs.
Which brings me right back to the comment you’re responding to. Why aren’t you happy making someone obscenely rich when it doesn’t cost you anything in the process?
A lot of people seem to fundamentally see the world as a zero-sum game. If someone else is getting rich then they feel like that must be making them poorer somehow. But that’s not how the world actually works. It’s entirely possible to create value without taking it away from someone else. When people invent new ways to make valuable products from worthless raw materials those products represent an increase of value in the world as a whole, the production of those products doesn’t make anyone poorer. It annoys me when people get mad that that’s happening.
Obscene wealth doesnt come from nowhere. It invariably comes from exploiting the efforts of others to their deteriment (even if that deteriment is immeasurably small).
The text that is being used to train models has a value, even if you believe yours does not. Others have spent huge amounts of money and effort educating themselves so that they can create articles, papers, literature, and even internet comments, which is then being used in these models.
So yeah, I guess I do see it as a zero sum game. In order for an exchange to be positive sum, both parties need to agree to the exchange. We do not get any choice in the exchange.
I think we fundamentally disagree here, and I have said enough. I am glad you are happy with the way things are, I wish I could feel the same way.
But that just isn’t so. Sometimes it can be true, but not invariably so. If an inventor comes up with a new invention and then sells it to people who want to buy the invention for the price that he’s selling it at (due to it providing them greater utility than the price he’s charging - that’s basic economics), then who has suffered any detriment in any of this? The inventor made money. The customers got the thing that they wanted. Nobody lost anything, and some people gained in the process.
Again, simply not true. I can think of all sorts of scenarios where a forced exchange could wind up with both parties benefiting. That’s not to say that any arbitrary forced exchange would be beneficial, of course, obviously not. But saying that it cannot happen can be easily disproved by counterexample.
This isn’t just an “agree to disagree” thing. The people raging about how ChatGPT et al somehow “stole” their Reddit shitposts and now think they’re owed money are trying to shut ChatGPT et al down. Huge swaths of intellectual property are sitting fallow because the people that own the rights aren’t doing anything with it but darned if they’ll let anyone else do something with it instead. It’s a destructive mindset, and not just for the people feeling it. It harms society as a whole.
For what it’s worth I generally agree with you, the proposition is to prod at where one might go if one were to take the capitalist mindset to a logical extreme. It’s not so much that someone might, as it is that an already profitable big business might. Nevertheless, the exasperation you’re expressing here, I share, and I’ve sort of inverted what you ask here out of dismay at how one’s supposed to go about things without serving to further help some big business’ profits.
Obviously the better and more practical solution is to leverage governments to break up pseudo-monopolies, regulate and tax businesses, and support unionization in every industry. However, this sort of twisted scenario I’m asking about here? That, to me, seems like the bizarre sort of logic that a staunch, honest capitalist would prefer instead despite it being to the detriment of society.
Just caught this in your other reply and decided to address this here. While this is possible, it also isn’t how the world actually works that this is consistently the case, and it is in those inconsistencies of value production that influence the mindset of others, don’t you think? Supposing that it is strictly a zero sum game is wrong, but supposing that wealth accrual isn’t sometimes at the cost of others is also wrong, I think it may be reasonable to say.
Wealth accrual often creates economic inequality, and in turn while the original action may not directly make people poorer, it can cost them in other ways of which I imagine we may all be too familiar.