AI is way more out of control than copyright.

There’s simply no way to justify what the AI compies have been doing. As that one Microsoft exec said, it’s the “largest theft of labor” in modern history

“teensy tiny data center” also known as a “computer”.

He’s running out of things to rename.

As a programmer myself I haven’t found that to be my experience. For every programmer I know that embraces generative AI tools, I know at least 1 or 2 who are critical of them, be it for ethical reasons or technical reasons. I’m not seeing a huge increase in productivity or quality patches either… But then again I’m probably in that camp of anti-corporate FOSS-loving indie millennials…

Regardless… whether it’s common practice or not doesn’t change the point that piracy is a whole lot easier to morally justify when developers and publishers are creating things an in unethical and exploitative way.

Publishers lose whatever ethical high ground they may have had to wring their hands about piracy when they are leveraging other people’s stolen labor.

Ok… Just don’t expect me to pay for a game that you didn’t bother paying artist and programmers to make, that is, if I had any desire to play slop games in the first place.

The most reasonable argument against software and media piracy has always been based on the ethics, morality and sustainability of financially supporting the people who create things that you enjoy. But in a new era of lazy and cheap generative slop that is trained on the theft and exploitation of the working class, why would anyone give a shit about supporting the “developers”–if you can even still call them that.

Shouldn’t need a damn permit!

Why are we acting like it’s news that generative AI companies are building their core products of the theft and exploitation of other people’s intellectual labor?

Get with the program, it’s their entire business model.

This seems like a totally needless blunder from Sony and an easy win for Microsoft.

If the game succeeds, Xbox now has the opportunity to have funded a spiritual sequel to Metal Gear Solid. But even if it doesn’t go anywhere, they have broken Kojima away from Playstation, at the very least.

The amount of intellectual property that Sony has let depart or atrophy over the decades is wild.

It’s equally weird to see the some people siding with billionaires and tech conglomerates instead of with the working class. It’s almost as if there’s more nuance to things than people who live online think…

The sad truth of our time is that richest for-profit tech corporations on Earth are making buckets of money through the exploitation of the intellectual labor of the creative class.

It was already hard enough to make a living as an artist or musician before… Now artists are being told that they have to compete in a market of finite demand against an infinite supply of generative AI slop that only exists as a byproduct of their own stolen work.

Considering there would be no AI product without the training data, it’s pretty much unconscionable that tech companies like Suno can make endless profit off of the work of others without even so much as consent, let alone compensation.

It’ll come back. People have been enamored with this concept since at least the 1980s.

Yeah, CS 1.6!

I’m not sure about the master server list just yet, sorry.

Yeah, that sort of thing.

I should say that I’m finally having some luck with using wireguard, so I’m making progress. Got a few rounds of Counter-Strike in with a friend about an hour ago!

I was hoping to have servers be more public, so visible on the master server list and able to be joined by random people. (I’m a glutton for punishment I guess. lol)

I’m a ssSUPER! Thanks for asssking!

Pathetic display of bootlicking, but not at all surprising from Google.

Slop is a consequence of tool use, not a design feature of the tool.

To me “slop” is a description that reflects the supply and demand imbalance of all generative AI output: there’s a practically infinite supply of AI generated stuff (to put it kindly), but very little demand.

For example, someone could generate a book with an LLM faster than any person could actually read it (assuming anyone actually wanted to read it in the first place…), and that represents a fundamental logical problem with regard to the value of things that AI produces.

There are vast amounts of ethical data to train against.

Of course there are. Like I said in the comment above: works in the public domain, works licensed cc-0, original works, works licensed for training, and so on. Ethical AI is possible.

But is that what your local AI is trained on?

If so, cool and good for you, you’re using the tool ethically.

But that’s not what I’m seeing from >99.99% of AI users out there generating Ghibli-core slop for an audience of 0. Stealing all of Kazuo Oga’s background art is not curing cancer or doing anything good for society, it’s just blatant exploitation of one man’s life’s work and legacy so frauds and billionaires can make a quick buck off of people who can’t tell the difference between AI slop and human art.

I could go on but you don’t really care, you care selectively. Or you wouldn’t be using the computer (the tool in front of your hands) undeniably built upon exploitation and compromise.

This comparison isn’t exactly working in your favor…

Even assuming some of my PC parts were made in a sweatshop in Asia, how many people were exploited to make it? How badly were they exploited? Were they payed something for their time and effort?

Odds are that the model you’re using was trained off a mountain of work from of untold numbers of people, all over the world, who didn’t see a red cent for their skills, time or effort. Not only is their work being exploited for other people’s profit, nobody even bothered to seek consent to do it in the first place.

This is exploitation of labor on an industrial scale. AI turns the whole world into a sweatshop for every person in the creative working class. Forget talking about the “means of production”, creative types today aren’t even able to control the fruits of their labor anymore.

It is a tool. It exists. You can’t stuff the genie back in the box.

Like every technology, it can and should be regulated to prevent abuse, exploitation and other forms of negative impact. Every new technology introduces new problems, challenges and implications. But unlike what happened with oil and nuclear technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, we shouldn’t wait 50-100 years to consider them.

The big problem I have with most AI stans is that you are all so infatuated with the subjective utility of the “tool” that you’re unwilling to even have a good faith conversation about the objective impact of this technology on the world and society.

Ok, you have a local model… but did you train it yourself? On what data?

Sadly, modern generative AI is a tool that’s built on top of the exploitation of other people’s work.

Actual human beings put blood, sweat and tears into their words, art and music, only for it to be used without consent or compensation by unskilled lazy misanthropes to generate an infinite sea of unwanted slop.

There is theoretically an ethical way to do AI (using public domain, creative commons, licensed or original data), but it seems to me that almost nobody is doing that.

Personally I don’t care how “useful” people want to claim AI is. For one, I’m not seeing things getting better faster, if anything they’re all getting worse. And regardless, the ends don’t justify the means, so if we’re exploitint people to generate slop I don’t really care how nice the slop is.

Even most of of the local and “open” models are exploiting the work of others by training off unethically sourced data without even so much as consent.

There is such a thing as ethical AI, but damn near zero people are doing it that way.

Oh NOW you care about stealing intellectual property!

Fuck off. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, AI assholes.

Sure… I’m all for giving people the benefit of the doubt, to some degree.

Unfortunately however, we do now exist in a zero trust world where you can’t always naively believe what you see to be authentic and legitimate… If I was going to commission or hire an artist to do some paid work today, I would need to at least see some kind of “proof of work”.

Because of the ethical implications of generative AI, people have every reason and right to be suspicious and critical of work that looks like it could be generated by AI. People who use AI understand this too, but sadly many of them choose the path of fraudulence and lying instead of reflecting on themselves.

When people make something like this, which to me is so obviously AI slop, and then is bold enough to try to deny it, it just adds insult to injury, frankly. “You can fool some people sometime, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” These dudes want to pee on our legs and tell us it’s raining…