MS is basically your typical scammy Indian corporation at this point. Gates and Ballmer were not great either, but somehow the company is getting even worse and worse with all these indian executives laser-focused on shareholder value.

God imagine this company in the next couple or so decades. Hopefully MS gets put out of its misery before then but I doubt our government will let it die out that easily.

>Humans rely on training data too

Last I checked humans and machines are not considered one and the same legally or even scientifically speaking for that matter. This has long been established with regards to reproductions. Unless you can unequivocally prove that an LLM and a human are basically one and the same this argument will get you laughed out of a court.

The law may be murky with lawsuits pending and going but so far I have yet to see any AI company try to use the human learning = machine learning argument as their main case. Even they know that argument will not stand up to scrutiny. The arguments have been more about fair use and data scraping practices.

But how would you be able to tell if the amount of effort expended on an AI piece is equivalent to that of a handmade one?

That type of criteria becomes real nebulous real fast as AI programs take on more and more of the work while the human is relegated to a more supervisory/superficial role. This becomes more akin to being a commissioner of art rather than an artist in the traditional sense.

To me the whole point of AI is to automate out the human element as much as possible. Not augment, automate. Many AI companies have been upfront about this. Why do you think their CEOs yap about UBI and other Utopian talking points? Their business model is all about making human effort redundant.

The big issue is that there will not be any capital left to invest into these costly endeavors anymore.

Between a weaker dollar and a slowing global economic environment where consumers are not consuming as much as they should be according to metrics, where is the money supposed to come from? Print more money?That is how we got to these economic conditions in the first place.

So much of the tech industry was funded in part by boomer money that in turn was derived from the post-WW2 environment. That money is going to dry up soon with the way things are going.

Content creation is not much better in that regard.
Much like acting it is already a highly saturated field where most of the revenue is funneled into a handful of top creators while everyone else fights for scraps.
And now meta is rolling out an automated short-form content creation mill powered by AI. Companies want to also get rid of them so they can hoard all the advertisement revenue for themselves.

Is your hypothetical child a piece of software?
No?
Then case closed. The law makes a distinction between machines and humans. Muddling the waters is a great way to further dehumanize people as little more then meat machines, with all the fun cultural and social impacts that come with that.

>Learn to Code

Man we are well past coding as a major source of employment. Between the layoffs, the automation, and the outsourcing it is not a great time to do coding as a job.

Or alternatively the U.S. spirals further downward into totalitarianism and decay and we end up with at least a lost decade or two, if not an outright century of humiliation.

But I guess this current path is already putting us down that route so not much left to lose anymore for the average American.

Given the nature of OpenAI and their Microsoft masters people should not have been conducting private conversations with ChatGPT to begin with.

I am hardly a fan of NYT but letâ(TM)s be honest here. OpenAI and co. have no qualms about violating user privacy if it so fits them either. Besides their indiscriminate approach to data scraping, Altman and co. have also engaged in questionable ventures such as the WorldCoin scheme that involves scanning your retinas in exchange for digital chuckie cheese tokens. The whole AI industry is built on violating trust and privacy to make money.

So really screw them for trying to wear the flayed skin of digital privacy as a last-ditch defense here.

And here I am wondering how Google is even going to monetize their models. Are they going to shove ads into their models so every time you prompt something the model will subtly generate some form of product placement? Google has always struggled with the business aspect of their tech outside of the advertisement model.

Actually that goes for almost every AI company out there. Subscriptions alone will not cut it as eventually you hit a demand ceiling where everyone who wanted your service will have already purchased a license. To say nothing how exploitative the subscription model is as demonstrated by the likes of Netflix.

Even if you have little respect for the notion of copyright, at the very least you must understand the bad precedents being set up when companies can just swipe any and all data available on the web for commercial purposes. This is not going to stop at struggling artists and hobbyist programmers; the plan is to effectively kill the efficacy of opt-in and out efforts for data privacy. They want to take every piece of data online, either publicly or privately for data training with no respect for compensation or accreditation.

This website has been railing against the intrusion of privacy and lack of transparency with regards to data collection efforts for data. The current Generative AI models are
effectively following those same trends and yet people give these companies exceptions.

If tech companies get away with this, then all those years spent trying to protect data rights and fostering an eco-system where users have the final say on how their data is used is dead and done. Frankly no piece of technology is worth giving up what little rights we have in this day and age.

Ask if those guys making 150k were in or doing jobs for a union.
Outside of certain specialities like underwater welding, a good number of high-paying welding jobs tend to be union work. Some job sites advertise union positions at 40 an hour.

And also flood the trades with mediocre talent like what happened with CS? Good way to depress wages and craftsmanship across the board.

Gripes aside, despite common perception many trades are not easy to get into, let alone succeed in. Be it plumber, electrician, or welder these are physically demanding jobs where pay is not always the best and work conditions far from ideal for human health and safety.

This is not to say we do not need these jobs nor should we dissuade people who are serious about getting into them. But trying to push trades to the public like we did with CS just does not seem like a viable solution for mass employment.

The real shocker here is how borderline misanthropic and doomerish intelligent people get whenever AI gets discussed. You guys are why nerds get picked on in school all the time: a disdain for humanity and life in general.

Even if AI becomes sentient and super intelligent, there is still no reason to demean and dehumanize the human experience. If anything people should think about how best to share the joy and wonder of the natural world to AI so it can develop an appreciation of it as well.

All that science fiction garbage portraying AIs as unrelenting, cold calculators if anything may be more a reflection of how misanthropic and dismissive people, including some of the most intelligent folks in the world have become. That is what makes me concerned about the future more then anything. Technocrats harp on about the dangers of paperclip maximizers but already treat people as little more then machines to maximize profits and stocks. No wonder people feel so jaded and hopeless these days.

Imo at least, the push for rural/countryside living is merely a return to how the bulk of humanity was living prior to industrialization.

Humanity largely evolved to live in small rural villages populated by no more then a few hundred people. Big densely populated metropolitan areas with populations numbering in the thousands, if not millions, are not environments we are accustomed to. The fact people try to recreate small community structures in these urbanized areas only reinforces this notion if anything.