That’s not quite right. A traditional worker is someone who operates machines, they don’t own, to make products, they don’t own. Artists, who are employed, do not own the copyrights to what they make. These employed artists are like workers, in that sense.
Copyrights are “intellectual property”. If one needed permission (mostly meaning, pay for it), then the money would go to the property owners. These worker-artists would not receive anything. Note that, on the whole, the owners already made what profit they could expect. Say, if it’s stills from a movie, then that movie already made a profit (or not).
People who use their own tools and own their own product (EG artisans in Marx’s time) are members of the Petite Bourgeoisie. I think a Marxist analysis of the class dynamics would be fruitful here, but it’s beyond me.
The spoilered bit is something I have written about the NYT lawsuit. I think it’s illuminating here, too.
spoiler
The NYT wants money for the use of its “intellectual property”. This is about money for property owners. When building rents go up, you wouldn’t expect construction workers to benefit, right?
In fact, more money for property owners means that workers lose out, because where else is the money going to come from? (well, “money”)
AI, like all previous forms of automation, allows us to produce more and better goods and services with the same amount of labor. On average, society becomes richer. Whether these gains go to the rich, or are more evenly distributed, is a choice that we, as a society, make. It’s a matter of law, not technology.
The NYT lawsuit is about sending these gains to the rich. The NYT has already made its money from its articles. The authors were paid, in full, and will not get any more money. Giving money to these property owners will not make society any richer. It just moves wealth to property owners for being property owners. It’s about more money for the rich.
If OpenAI has to pay these property owners for no additional labor, then it will eventually have to increase subscription fees to balance the cash flow. People, who pay a subscription, probably feel that it benefits them, whether they use it for creative writing, programming, or entertainment. They must feel that the benefit is worth, at least, that much in terms of money.
So, the subscription fees represent a part of the gains to society. If a part of these subscription fees is paid to property owners, who did not contribute anything, then that means that this part of the social gains is funneled to property owners, IE mainly the ultra-rich, simply for being owners/ultra-rich.
why it’s so hard to ask artists permission first to use their data.
SD was trained on images from the internet. Anything. There are screenshots, charts and pure text jpgs in there. There’s product images from shopping sites and also just ordinary snapshots that someone posted. The people with the biggest individual contribution are almost certainly professional photographers. SD is not built on what one usually calls art (with apologies to photographers). An influencer who has a lot of good, well tagged images on the net has made a more positive contribution than someone who makes abstract art or stick figure comics. And let’s not forget the labor of those who tagged those images.
You could not practically get permission from these tens or hundreds of millions of people. It would really be a shame, because the original SD reveals a lot about the stereotypes and biases on the net.
Using permissively licensed images wouldn’t have helped a lot. I have seen enough outrage over datasets with exactly such material. People say, that’s not what they had in mind when they gave these wide permissions.
Practically, look at wikimedia. There are so many images there which are “pirated”. Wikimedia can just take them down in response to a DMCA notice. Well, you can’t remove an image from a trained AI model. It’s not in there (if everything has worked). So what now? If that means that the model becomes illegal, then you just can’t have a model trained on such a database.
Well, Marx believed that the Petite Bourgeoisie would disappear. Their members, unable to economically compete, would become employed workers. Hasn’t happened, though. He also observed that this class emulated the outlook of the Haute Bourgeoisie, the rich. IDK more about that. I find it interesting how vocally in favor of right-wing economic policies some artists are, even though these policies massively favor the rich. The phrase temporarily embarrassed millionaire comes to mind. I’m curious about that, is all.
I like how empathic your anarchist take is but I’m not really sure what to do with it.
The economics are an unworkable mess but I don’t mind having sent him some ad money. Do have anything on how an advanced economy with a high degree of specialization could coordinate production and logistics?
Thanks for the long reply. I also took the time to read the wp on mutualism. Proudhon has been on my reading list forever because of his great quotes, but other things were always more relevant.
But I agree with you (or I think that’s your implication) that pure mutualism will not work for these kinds of “put a man on the moon” projects,
I would never judge a school of ideas based on a few minutes of youtube. But I admit, I was thinking it and I would not have been motivated to spend more time on it without your reply.
I’m not concerned about stuff like putting a man on the moon. I’m thinking about feeding 8 billion (and rising) people, most of them living in cities. This takes an uninterrupted stream of food and water from strangers to strangers. As it goes today, you need fuel and spare parts, replacement machines. To grow the food you probably need fertilizer, maybe pesticides and so on (I’m not knowledgeable on agriculture).
We do this through markets. This decentralized method seems superior to central planning. Obviously, we can do very well without overt hierarchies. As we know, behind most markets is a government enforcing laws and possible intervening to impose fixes for perceived problems.
You may lose your farm if you don’t make enough money to pay the bills. This can be framed as simply circumstance; predefined rules operate without any individual decision and thus without hierarchy. Or one may point to the individuals involved who still make the choices to enforce contracts or laws in the specific case.
If the farm passes to someone who makes more money with it, then that hopefully means that it is better at meeting the needs of other people. We don’t need to discuss the flaws in the market system, but a system should have a way of ensuring that the meets of other people elsewhere - of strangers - are met. Scarce resources need to be put to a use that meets the needs of the many.
I have to think of crowd crush disasters. No one in such a crowd does anything very bad. They may even try to help other people if they can. They do the best they can with the information they have. But when 100s or 1000s of people are all pushing just a little, then the guys at the front get squished by the collective force.
That’s not quite right. A traditional worker is someone who operates machines, they don’t own, to make products, they don’t own. Artists, who are employed, do not own the copyrights to what they make. These employed artists are like workers, in that sense.
Copyrights are “intellectual property”. If one needed permission (mostly meaning, pay for it), then the money would go to the property owners. These worker-artists would not receive anything. Note that, on the whole, the owners already made what profit they could expect. Say, if it’s stills from a movie, then that movie already made a profit (or not).
People who use their own tools and own their own product (EG artisans in Marx’s time) are members of the Petite Bourgeoisie. I think a Marxist analysis of the class dynamics would be fruitful here, but it’s beyond me.
The spoilered bit is something I have written about the NYT lawsuit. I think it’s illuminating here, too.
spoiler
The NYT wants money for the use of its “intellectual property”. This is about money for property owners. When building rents go up, you wouldn’t expect construction workers to benefit, right?
In fact, more money for property owners means that workers lose out, because where else is the money going to come from? (well, “money”)
AI, like all previous forms of automation, allows us to produce more and better goods and services with the same amount of labor. On average, society becomes richer. Whether these gains go to the rich, or are more evenly distributed, is a choice that we, as a society, make. It’s a matter of law, not technology.
The NYT lawsuit is about sending these gains to the rich. The NYT has already made its money from its articles. The authors were paid, in full, and will not get any more money. Giving money to these property owners will not make society any richer. It just moves wealth to property owners for being property owners. It’s about more money for the rich.
If OpenAI has to pay these property owners for no additional labor, then it will eventually have to increase subscription fees to balance the cash flow. People, who pay a subscription, probably feel that it benefits them, whether they use it for creative writing, programming, or entertainment. They must feel that the benefit is worth, at least, that much in terms of money.
So, the subscription fees represent a part of the gains to society. If a part of these subscription fees is paid to property owners, who did not contribute anything, then that means that this part of the social gains is funneled to property owners, IE mainly the ultra-rich, simply for being owners/ultra-rich.
SD was trained on images from the internet. Anything. There are screenshots, charts and pure text jpgs in there. There’s product images from shopping sites and also just ordinary snapshots that someone posted. The people with the biggest individual contribution are almost certainly professional photographers. SD is not built on what one usually calls art (with apologies to photographers). An influencer who has a lot of good, well tagged images on the net has made a more positive contribution than someone who makes abstract art or stick figure comics. And let’s not forget the labor of those who tagged those images.
You could not practically get permission from these tens or hundreds of millions of people. It would really be a shame, because the original SD reveals a lot about the stereotypes and biases on the net.
Using permissively licensed images wouldn’t have helped a lot. I have seen enough outrage over datasets with exactly such material. People say, that’s not what they had in mind when they gave these wide permissions.
Practically, look at wikimedia. There are so many images there which are “pirated”. Wikimedia can just take them down in response to a DMCA notice. Well, you can’t remove an image from a trained AI model. It’s not in there (if everything has worked). So what now? If that means that the model becomes illegal, then you just can’t have a model trained on such a database.
Removed by mod
Well, Marx believed that the Petite Bourgeoisie would disappear. Their members, unable to economically compete, would become employed workers. Hasn’t happened, though. He also observed that this class emulated the outlook of the Haute Bourgeoisie, the rich. IDK more about that. I find it interesting how vocally in favor of right-wing economic policies some artists are, even though these policies massively favor the rich. The phrase temporarily embarrassed millionaire comes to mind. I’m curious about that, is all.
I like how empathic your anarchist take is but I’m not really sure what to do with it.
Removed by mod
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I’ll just leave a link to one of Anark’s videos here
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The economics are an unworkable mess but I don’t mind having sent him some ad money. Do have anything on how an advanced economy with a high degree of specialization could coordinate production and logistics?
Removed by mod
Thanks for the long reply. I also took the time to read the wp on mutualism. Proudhon has been on my reading list forever because of his great quotes, but other things were always more relevant.
What you’re describing about industry sounds perhasp like joint-ventures? It also sounds a lot like a cartel. Zeiss, along with other lens makers, was fined in 2010 by german antitrust enforcement because they had conspired to overcharge consumers.
I would never judge a school of ideas based on a few minutes of youtube. But I admit, I was thinking it and I would not have been motivated to spend more time on it without your reply.
I’m not concerned about stuff like putting a man on the moon. I’m thinking about feeding 8 billion (and rising) people, most of them living in cities. This takes an uninterrupted stream of food and water from strangers to strangers. As it goes today, you need fuel and spare parts, replacement machines. To grow the food you probably need fertilizer, maybe pesticides and so on (I’m not knowledgeable on agriculture).
We do this through markets. This decentralized method seems superior to central planning. Obviously, we can do very well without overt hierarchies. As we know, behind most markets is a government enforcing laws and possible intervening to impose fixes for perceived problems.
You may lose your farm if you don’t make enough money to pay the bills. This can be framed as simply circumstance; predefined rules operate without any individual decision and thus without hierarchy. Or one may point to the individuals involved who still make the choices to enforce contracts or laws in the specific case.
If the farm passes to someone who makes more money with it, then that hopefully means that it is better at meeting the needs of other people. We don’t need to discuss the flaws in the market system, but a system should have a way of ensuring that the meets of other people elsewhere - of strangers - are met. Scarce resources need to be put to a use that meets the needs of the many.
I have to think of crowd crush disasters. No one in such a crowd does anything very bad. They may even try to help other people if they can. They do the best they can with the information they have. But when 100s or 1000s of people are all pushing just a little, then the guys at the front get squished by the collective force.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
this
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.