I don’t get this. AI bros talk about how “in the near future” no one will “need” to be a writer, a filmmaker or a musician anymore, as you’ll be able to generate your own media with your own parameters and preferences on the fly. This, to me, feels like such an insane opinion. How can someone not value the ingenuity and creativity behind a work of art? Do these people not see or feel the human behind it all? And are these really opinions that you’ve encountered outside of the internet?
Except often it’s not even traditional entry barriers. Look how bad Google search has gotten, overrun by AI blogposts and advertising slop. Those aren’t entry barriers, those are “hold up, is this even content?” barriers.
We regulated the assembly line and gave laborers compensation and safety rights when power tools increased their capacity. So too, we could force OpenAI et al to compensate the copyright holders from whom they scraped data. No one is calling for the genie to go back in, only for the corporatists to stop being the ones with all the wishes.
Fuck expanding copyright’s power in any way. Effort better spent on making AI content illegal to sell or another way of ending corporate profit off of it