It's unfortunate, though completely predictable, how Generative AI has divided people so solidly into camps. On one side you have people who use the word "theft" as a kind of shibboleth. On the other, you have tech leaders saying things like, "maybe those creative roles shouldn't have existed in the first place".
As someone who is both a technologist but also has an art degree, I feel out of place in this conversation. Because, while I totally understand the economic anxiety and philosophical discomfort of this new technology – I also see it as a kind of Library of Alexandria. A synthesizer built on the collective knowledge output of all of humanity. It's incredible!
But, things didn't turn out so good for the first Library of Alexandria. Beware of mobs!
How can a company pretend to be a fake library, i.e use and charge for all those copyrighted works, while I can go to prison if I download a movie for free? Should I also pretend I’m my own library? That’s my issue with those companies.
I feel frustration and in some situations, contempt: with both sides, with the situation, with the collective decisions, and lack thereof that got us here, with the hoi polloi getting distracted,yet again, by their corporate masters (1), by a system eternally being ransacked by executives; executives so inept and profoundly sociopathic that they aren't even aware there's a quiet part not to say out loud.
Yeah. Not just the sociopaths (which I think are a small minority), but I think the societal awareness and conventions window has shifted profoundly in tech, and we're very echo-chamber.
Tech industry today is pretty much 1980s greed-is-good Wall Street screwing over everyone they can, and the main difference is that today we don't realize we're behaving like the stereotypical coked-up bad guys.
We do tend to have some socially progressive ideas among tech workers, which is great. But not great is if we anchor our self-perceptions to that do-gooder side, and then give ourselves a blank check for society-destroying greed and obliviousness in other regards. (Can we please respect people's pronouns and also not screw over their economics, privacy, thinking, government, and general wellbeing?)
> we don't realize we're behaving like the stereotypical coked-up bad guys.
I recently came to realization that the 80s were able to be fueled by cocaine because we lacked the tools to identify a coked out maniac. People must have just seen these people as "engaged, enthusiastic, and passionate".
Now, we have the tools to see the current snake oil salesmen (this is what? our nth cycle? VR, GigEconomy, Blockchain, AR, ...) but people are still defending them. It's difficult to watch again and again.
As someone who is both a technologist but also has an art degree, I feel out of place in this conversation. Because, while I totally understand the economic anxiety and philosophical discomfort of this new technology – I also see it as a kind of Library of Alexandria. A synthesizer built on the collective knowledge output of all of humanity. It's incredible!
But, things didn't turn out so good for the first Library of Alexandria. Beware of mobs!