Humans are special for two reasons: you can’t clone them infinitely, and they are time-bound.
If I learn to write news articles by reading the NYT, I’m not then able to duplicate myself infinitely and fill every role at every news publisher. I am but one human, producing one human’s output and consuming one human’s space within whatever pursuit I undertake. Critically, I still leave room for others to do the same thing.
Eventually I also die and then someone else can come along to replace me. I’m finite, AI is not. It doesn’t get used up or retire.
If you consider that there’s a fixed amount of societal capacity for whatever undertaking is in question (news journalism, art generation, etc.) then as a human, I take up only a certain amount and only for a certain amount of time. I will never arbitrarily duplicate to produce the work of 10, 100, 1000, etc. humans. I will also shuffle on after about 50 years and someone else, having potentially learnt from me, can now gainfully exist within the world in my stead.
The capacity for infinite commoditisation that AI brings is necessarily a critical distinction to humans when it comes to considering them performing equivalent functions. They must be treated differently.
> If I learn to write news articles by reading the NYT, I’m not then able to duplicate myself infinitely and fill every role at every news publisher. I am but one human, producing one human’s output and consuming one human’s space within whatever pursuit I undertake. Critically, I still leave room for others to do the same thing.
This is a luddite argument that can equally apply to any automation. A robotic arm can be trained to do the same thing a human line worker does, but the robotic arm can be copied infinitely and work 24/7 leaving zero room for other humans to do the same thing. Should we ban robotic arms?
We have already banned robotic arms in this case. It’s illegal to make a robot that mass manufactures someone else’s IP. It’s considered copyright infringement and is a well trodden law, the introduction of a machine in the middle doesn’t magically launder the copyright infringement.
Like I say to my toddler, there is no need for rudeness to make a point.
Nowhere did the poster say that is “sufficient” reason to ban ai. They were clarifying how software is different from humans and only that. You need to go up a couple of comments and combine this explanation with the other part of copyright infringement concerns to see why the “whole” thing is concerning for the news industry.
Personally, those criteria seem irrelevant. If people were immortal and infinitely replicable, what they're allowed to read/learn/speak shouldn't change! Ditto for the machine counterfactual (limited AI reproduction + mortality). Maybe I'm just being unhelpfully sci-fi/abstract here.
If humans are contextually special here, a "passing the torch" argument seems unconvincing, to me.
If I learn to write news articles by reading the NYT, I’m not then able to duplicate myself infinitely and fill every role at every news publisher. I am but one human, producing one human’s output and consuming one human’s space within whatever pursuit I undertake. Critically, I still leave room for others to do the same thing.
Eventually I also die and then someone else can come along to replace me. I’m finite, AI is not. It doesn’t get used up or retire.
If you consider that there’s a fixed amount of societal capacity for whatever undertaking is in question (news journalism, art generation, etc.) then as a human, I take up only a certain amount and only for a certain amount of time. I will never arbitrarily duplicate to produce the work of 10, 100, 1000, etc. humans. I will also shuffle on after about 50 years and someone else, having potentially learnt from me, can now gainfully exist within the world in my stead.
The capacity for infinite commoditisation that AI brings is necessarily a critical distinction to humans when it comes to considering them performing equivalent functions. They must be treated differently.