Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

The computer allows the humans a lot of leeway. For one thing, the computer represents a large diffusion of responsibility. Do you hold the programmers responsible? The managers who told them to build the software? How about the hardware manufacturers or the IT people who built or installed the system? Maybe the Executives?

What if the program was built with all good intentions and just has a critical exploit that someone abused?

It's just not so straightforward to hold the humans accountable when there are so many humans that touch any piece of commercial software

For example, if American Airlines uses a computer to help decide who gets refunds, they can't then blame the computer when it discriminates against group X, or steals money, because it was their own "business decision" that is responsible for that action (with the assist from a stupid computer they chose to use).

This is different from when their landing gear doesn't go down because of a software flaw in some component. They didn't produce the component and they didn't they didn't choose to delegate their "business decisions" to it, so as long as they used an approved vendor etc they should be ok. Choosing the vendor, the maintainence schedules, etc, etc: those are the "business decisions" they're responsible for.

> human work has no agency or free will behind it

There is one case where it is sort of true, but crucially 1) agency still exists, it is just restricted, and 2) it is called “slavery”. I felt like your comment not only equates a human being with freedom/agency (whether restricted or not) to a software tool, it also equates “I have to do my job because it pays money” with having brutally been robbed of freedom, which really underplays how bad the latter is.

> something that exists only because of collective result of 1), but any individual contribution to it is of no importance

Collective result, which consists of individual works. That argument appears to be “if we steal enough, then it is okay”.

> Motivations from point 1. have already been satisfied

We exist over time, not only in the past. A swath of motivations for doing any original work is going away for upcoming original work on which chatbots etc. are built.

> that is not accessible to any individual creator, because (again) it comes from sheer bulk and diversity of works, not from any individual one

Yes, humans can be inspired and build upon a huge diversity of works, like what has been happening for as long as humanity existed (you may have heard the phrase “everything is a remix”). If you talk to me and I previously read Kant then who knows, whatever you create may have been inspired by Kant.

Libraries have done great job at amplifying that ability. Search engines put massive datasets at your fingertips while maintaining attribution (you are always directed to the source), connection of authors and readers, and sometimes even offering ways of earning money (of course, profiting off it as well; the beauty of capitalism). I am sure there are plenty of other examples of ML models in various fields that achieved great results yet were trained on appropriately licensed work. In other words, none of this does justify theft.