AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

Corrections in order of appearance not importance:

* No legitimate justification: their materials are being stolen to train and be regurgitated by LLMs and generate products. They are not being compensated yet their contribution goes on to make AI companies money, and preventing open consumption of their materials, to assist an AI company in rendering them obsolete, is not a justification for retaliating? You would have the barest whiff of a point if OpenAI and company were going to artists, requesting materials for training, and were given tainted ones, that at least I could say was duplicitous. But not when it's publicly posted, that's just an AI company not doing a good job of minding their input.

* Serve only to make access to and transformation of info more difficult: As in, you have to go to the website of the person actually publishing the information, as opposed to having it read in a Google summary? Also worth noting this inconvenience applies only to a theoretical person using an AI search tool. Everyone else is unaffected. Seems like if you're going to a particular service provider whom is uniquely unable to provide the service you want, that seems like an easy to solve issue: use something else.

* can only hope that by these egregiously anti-social luddites: Your daily reminder that the Luddites were not anti-technology, they were anti-corporations using mechanization to make an ever dwindling number of workers produce ever more products of ever lower quality.

* we'll gain the knowledge to render this category of attack moot for the foreseeable future: This is a bad strategy and historically has not worked for a single industry. If your industry itself exists in open opposition to consumer movements, you don't win. At best, you survive. But there's no version of this where everyone just unwillingly adopts AI and you can tell them to deal with it. Whole companies now are cropping up to help people who want to opt-out of the AI future as promised.

Luddites now and then are not as a whole opposed to technology and progress. They attack technology that gets used as cover for rolling back labor rights and protections. It's a really simple pattern: if you fuck people over they get mad at you and break your things. If AI was training on all of humanity's creative output and the results were enriching all people, you would see a much, much softer pushback than the current state of affairs where the richest people in the world are bragging about how they're going to put people out of work faster than one another and jealousy guarding the derivative works produced by their training, while simultaneously cozying up to policy makers to loosen environmental and health regulations to keep "hyperscaling."

Are you serious? In what world did we agree "someone may train incredibly important systems on our every utterance, without any compensation, and we will do what we can to not impede them"?

Can you not see how there's a difference?

I have a perhaps unique viewpoint among people in tech, at least among the sample I see on HN

I simultaneously think

1. AI will be a massively impactful technology on the scale of the industrial revolution or greater

2. The potential upside of AI is enormous, but potential downside is just as big (utopia or certain ruin)

3. Most current AI companies are acting somewhat reasonably in a game-theory sense with respect to the deployment of their tech, and aren't especially evil or dastardly compared to Google in the 2000s, social media in the 2010s

4. AI safety is an under-appreciated concern and many who are spending time nitpicking the details are missing the bigger picture of what ASI and complete human obsolescence look like.

5. No amount of whiny protest, data sabotaging, or small-scale angst or claiming that AI is "fake" or hoping for the bubble to pop is going to have even a marginal effect on the development of AI. It is too powerful and the rewards are too great. If anything it will have an overall negative effect because it will convince labs that their potential role as a utopian, public benefactor will not be appreciated, so will instead align themselves with the military industrial complex for goodwill.

> The last time a property class was removed was _slaves_.

Easy counterexample: titles of nobility. Also perpetual bonds, delegated taxation rights, the ability to mint currency. The list goes on.

If you're going to use history to support your AI bull agenda, you should at least pre-fly it with the AI first -- it would have pointed this out.

> Arguing that copyright is good because a subset of big tech doesn't want it around is as stupid as arguing that slavery is good because the robber barons don't like it.

Sorry, who's saying it's good? You are, actually, insofar as you're willing to support the right of AI companies to take people's information and use it to create copyrighted model weights. Why do you care less about the intellectual property of billionaires than that of the common man? Do you really think they're on your side?