Technology

[I]t would layout the path forward for other creators and IP owners. The vast majority of which are individuals which are those most harmed.

Everyone owns some property, but a tiny percentage of rich people own most of all property. EG quick google says that a daily newspaper contains 50,000 to 200,000 words. That's about as much as a novel. Seems about right. So in even a few months, a single newspaper exceeds the lifetime output of any single author.

It gets worse. Something like ChatGPT is trained on several hundred billion words. So even the NYT couldn't negotiate for more than a tiny part of the training data. For a single individual, the share would be so small, that the bureaucracy of handling the payments would eat a chunk. They'd have to go through middle men, like established publishers or stock photo site. So, a part of any money for "creators", would still be redirected to the rich. You can google how much shutterstock contributors get for the image AI trained on that data.

Mind that companies like Meta and Apple have their fingers on a lot of user data. They can use their TOS to train on that data. In the long run, it would only get worse because AI companies have their fingers on the creations.

Eventually, our system relies on the fact that people have to do something for others to get money. Even people like Zuckerberg or Bezos built companies that provided services that people wanted. The problem with Big Tech, with "enshittification", is that these companies are now in a position where they don't have to do that anymore. Anything that makes it possible to extract money just for being the owner of some property will make everything worse.

In Japan the law is that you can train AI on anything, unless it is a dataset made specifically for AI training (IIRC). You don't exactly need this provision. You would not put such a dataset on the open internet, if you don't want it to be free. But it might come in handy if a dataset gets leaked.

I am certain that human artists will not disappear any time soon. It's true that skill at manual drawing or painting is made less important. Digital artists, so far, could not emulate these looks well, certainly not without manually drawing on a graphics tablet. But digital artists are still working artists. I would think that the digital part of the skill set was already, pre-AI, the commercially more lucrative part.

I can see that genAI disrupts particular income streams, such as stock photography, or small commissions to draw role-playing characters. However, that does not mean that there will be a net loss of artist jobs or income. Say, pre-AI you could spend your limited money to either commission a single drawing or on a night out. Post-AI you might get 10 or a hundred images for the same money. You might be more inclined to take the images over the night out. In that case, waiters and bartenders would take the hit, and would have to become digital artists.

It's impossible to predict the eventual outcome. It depends on what people chose, what people value; on fashion. I am certain of one thing, though. As we need less and less labor to satisfy our basic needs, we will invest more into leisure, entertainment and such. Why is barista a thing? The luxury of a freshly made coffee, prepared with skill, has become fashionable.

Incidentally, the same worries (and mean-spirited attacks) also existed when photography was invented.

I agree on the social programs but I must point out that the issue is not new (and I'm not talking about photography or digital art). Which is why such programs exist, to some degree. We accept that this happens continuously for blue collar jobs and not just because of automation. We're not just making more and better robots, we're also switching from fossil fuels to renewables, from combustion engines to electric, and so on.

You may have heard of the loss of factory jobs over the last couple decades as a social issue. Automation has been blamed for the so-called hollowing out of the middle class. These former middle class jobs have disappeared, freeing up workers to EG deliver food. So you're left with jobs that require a university degree at the top and a driving license at the bottom.

What's new is that AI is coming for white collar jobs. I think that explains a lot of the reaction. It's the people who think and write in newspapers and on the internet who have reason to worry about their cushy careers. The threat is to people like them and the people they know; their class, if you will. I believe (and hope) that AI will benefit society by putting everyone into the same boat again. If (or when) an apprentice electrician can do the same task as an electrical engineer with a Master's degree, then the middle is no more hollow. Sure, the engineer loses out, but people on average are richer and more equal in income.

The major threat to this scenario is policy choices that entrench elites. The NYT lawsuit is an attempt at just that.

Sorry for the rambling wall of text. Thank you, too, for your politeness. It's perfectly usual to talk past another on occasion. I think many neurotypicals would not have reacted so well to my probing questions.