ChatGPT turned generative AI into an “anything tool”

Isn't that what they are already doing but with human writers? Screenwriting is mostly just a formula. Aside from being cheaper, I don't see any difference in terms of quality.

> None of those differences really says anything about morality of having an AI do things, unless you want to argue that the AI suffer from their (mis)treatment.

I mean, if it was actually AI and not machine learning, that would certainly be a question wouldn't it? That being said, I'm not saying the machine is suffering. I'm saying the people it's replacing cannot possibly hold their own. There is simply no way in hell a person can compete with generative AI, assuming of course you don't need perfection just "good enough." And given how massive components of the modern economy get by on far less than "good enough" I'd say that's a solid reason to be concerned.

> People sometimes state that The Simpsons is now drawn in sweatshops somewhere in Asia. Assuming that's true, or at least that it's happened at least once for at least some cartoon, does it make any difference at all to the question of where the people directing them get their ideas from or how those workers learned to do their thing?

Collaborative creative work among a team of individuals regardless of their location is not the same thing as generative art trained on a dataset it's designed to mimic, come on now. You're grasping at some pretty flimsy straws here.

Nothing starts from scratch...

> Sure. And? This is the exact same problem with offshoring to sweatshops, and also with all automation from the pottery wheel onwards; and in the industrial revolution this automation happened in a way to cause the invention of Communism.

Yes but crucially: the industrial revolution and automation in general has historically been targeted at things of need, in various stripes: one can argue that the demand for goods, be they food, cellphones, televisions, cars, what have you makes automation extremely helpful: yes there was a period where laborers were replaced and priced out of the market, but many eventually returned. The ability to produce 65" televisions at scale and sell them for cheap enough to let people buy them at scale has led to the prices of televisions cratering, and in the context of products consumed by large portions of the market, this is a desirable and good thing (with caveats).

This breaks down with creative output though. No matter how cheap they are, one person can only consume so many, for example, movies and television shows. Even if generative movies were a thing (I don't think they are yet?) and you could produce them just block by block at scale... there's a ceiling there. People can only consume so many movies. You will saturate that market incredibly quickly, and even that is assuming the market of moviegoers will be interested in an AI movie.

Hell, Disney has already learned this without even needing AI to do it. A big part of their ongoing failure that is their streaming service is they completely and utterly saturated the market for Marvel content. They poured billions into all manner of series and films, the quality has steadily declined, and despite being cheaper and easier to access than most, people have still managed to get sick of it. And however you want to slice it one thing AI cannot overcome is that it cannot create new, novel concepts: it can only remix and recombine existing things into new combinations. This is probably good for hobby tier stuff, but for industry? This is going to crater VERY quickly I believe.

> I'm certainly curious what the modern equivalent to Karl Marx publishes, and how much it will differ from The Communist Manifesto.

I enjoy David Graeber personally.

> The argument you're making doesn't appear to care about the differences — it should bite on both, or neither.

I mean there are definitely things to be said about outsourcing in that conversation, the incentives at play that make these animators willing/interested in learning a style of animation that is not part of their culture, the benefits involved in their education, why they're paid a fraction of what westerners would be for the same work while the product is then sold for the same if not a higher price. I just don't think it's relevant, they're still people and still work within the limitations of people. You're not talking about a widget press that forges 10 widgets with the work of a single operator vs. a blacksmith making them by hand with regard to generative art, you're talking a widget press that uses less resources to produce effectively infinite widgets at incredible paces that are simply unfathomable to the blacksmith, and also somehow the machine stole the souls of millions of blacksmiths to enable it to work.

The metaphors just break down when talking about this, because of the sheer differentials involved.

> These are very different economic constraints and therefore require different solutions.

This is often listed as the reason why it’s ok for human to learn from a prior art, but not for a LLM. The question is why? If the act of learning is stealing, then it is still stealing, no matter how small scale, and every single human on earth has committed it.

The LLM vendor may benefit more than a mere mortal pupil because of the scale and reach. At the same time the LLM may make the prior art more visible and popular and may benefit the original creator more, even if only indirectly.

Also if content creators are entitled to some financial reward by LLM vendors, it is only appropriate that the creators should pay back to those that they learn from, and so on. I fail to see how such a scheme can be set up.