"Content" is already maximally cheap: just copy and paste. AI-generated material – at least, with the current genre of GPT-style predictive text algorithms – doesn't produce original content; it just serves to dilute our global knowledge base with semantic white noise and lossy copies of existing knowledge.
-Pablo Picasso
The spam did not disappear with people moving away from e-mail. On the contrary, it's just been given legitimacy by the platform owners - who all happen to make money from spam.
Yeah absolutely, acceptable in case of humans and not acceptable in case of GPT.
GPT is not human. It is employed by a human to get around having to benefit other humans with attention and money.
Meanwhile human world is structured around fate, happiness of humans -- such things guide our considerations as to what to consider legal and what not.
There are other differences that make it OK for humans and not GPT (like we can attribute and credit what we learned from, whose ideas we used in work and what inspired us) but they are less significant than above principle
For greater minds that wrote them first, from nature stole them all.
-- Totally me.
And programmers are not without sin either - how many people here run to stackoverflow and copy some answer, or mash it up and produce something similar-but-cleaned-up? That's going to get a lot more powerful in not too many years too... and the thing is, is your little DTO file with blocks of fields and setters and getters really novel and worthy of a government license to cultural exclusivity, or is it a relatively obvious implementation of an API? Which (per Oracle v. Google) are also not really copyrightable...
Humanity hasn't squared the reality of most content being low-value generative trash already (despite being human-generated!) with the reality of a system that is designed to produce up to ~150 years of exclusivity (lifetime of the author +75 years). Like, that's the long and short of it. A lot of what we do as humans is just building up a squishy water-filled neural net ("how to make a painting in the style of Picasso") and running random prompts and goal-seeking through it and cleaning up the generative output. Now AIs have gotten to the level of "average college student" and it turns out that's not actually all that difficult or interesting anymore, but we're still working in this model where that's supposed to be worth ~150 years of cultural exclusivity and protection.
Well, copyright suffers from the same problem communism suffers. For communism to work, everyone should be on board. For copyright and patents to work as expected, every country on earth, every town and every city's laws should be almost the same regarding to that. As soon as even just one municipality anywhere on the planet, is free of patent laws, the exact same moment a factory will pop up and produce an expensive patented pharmaceutical product which it will sell for half the price, or 1/10 of the price.
Capitalism on the other hand, works even almost everyone else doesn't like it, and 2 people agree on a peaceful exchange of commodities, following a price the market sets, or it is discovered right away.
As a rule of thumb, anything that requires everyone to implement rules and follow them, for it to work, will fail sooner than later. When a product in some part of the world is selling 100x of the normal price because of some patent, counter incentives are detonated in some other part to produce it and sell it for 50x the price. This huge profit margin creates a chain reaction of other economic actors producing it as well, and selling it for 25x the price.
Additionaly the eating problem can be solved by capitalism, not communism. Exchange of art for electronic money, a marketplace of information is what we need. Bitcoin (not BTC) will play an instrumental role in that.
A.I generated images of picasso, are awesome. I created many of them, one series of them are "Darth Vader riding a red tricycle, in the style of picasso". They are so good you're gonna fall of the chair.
Being concerned about patents is a very weak argument against technology which saves lives around the world (using non patented crops, no less!) and is responsible for allowing more people to eat healthier food.
Second, everytime this topic comes up, pro-GMOist make it sound like the technology is making some great strides with providing 'healthier food for everyone' with no downside. Why is it that the current model for GMO aims to increase resistance to pesticides instead of simply growing the yield? It probably has nothing to do with the fact that the company that provides you the seeds, also sells the pesticide. And how about the said pesticides tendency to destroy the micro-organisms in the soil, in effect making it harder to grow crops, and ultimately starting a loop for "more GMO, more pesticide, more land, repeat".
Figure a less disruptive business model, and I might be more pro-GMO myself.
What? TONS of GMO foods are made for things other than pesticides. Nutritional content, size, yield, taste - in fact one of the biggest uses of GMOs is making the plants need less pesticides! If you think the only reason GMOs exist is to sell more pesticides, you just do not know what you are talking about.
"Contrary to often-repeated claims that today’s genetically-engineered crops have, and are reducing pesticide use, the spread of glyphosate-resistant weeds in herbicide-resistant weed management systems has brought about substantial increases in the number and volume of herbicides applied. If new genetically engineered forms of corn and soybeans tolerant of 2,4-D are approved, the volume of 2,4-D sprayed could drive herbicide usage upward by another approximate 50%. The magnitude of increases in herbicide use on herbicide-resistant hectares has dwarfed the reduction in insecticide use on Bt crops over the past 16 years, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future."[1]
Please bare in mind that I'm not advocating against GMO. I'm advocating against hailing GMO as a win:win to all of society and environment.
[1] https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2190-471... "Impacts of genetically engineered crops on pesticide use in the U.S. -- the first sixteen years"
It doesn't; there are plenty of traits beyond pesticide resistance that have GM crops targeting them, including yield, drought resistance, nitrogen fixation, etc.
Pesticide resistance is the most established on the market becauae there happened to be particular success with it decades ago, that’s it.
Negative consumer sentiment toward GMOs means that neither the producers nor the growers of GM crops are seeking public attention to the fact that crops are GM, and their products are mostly sold in markets that don’t require GM labelling for the same reason, so the crops already in the public consciousness are all that stays there.
consider an example from another area. the assembly line and "k12 education". a 'raw material' (but it's actually a child) enters an assembly line, every year they will be passed to the next part of the process, another professional worker will receive the product and will work on it/them for a year.
Also notice how modern elementary education treats the teachers; they far too much like factory workers! low wages, they haven't much of a choice about how to do their jobs.
Now consider the mindsets behind the successful GMO crops (+pesticide combos) that have been the money makers for this companies.
And consider the mono-crop mentalities and the above mentioned feedback cycle: gmo+pesticide kill the soil leading to more gmo+pesticide; it's a vicious cycle. it's a vicious cycle that keeps making more money!
and again, consider the mindsets involved. why are we educating children like they were cars in a production line?
we have a difficult problem, and no power to do anything about it
This might be the case, but still my original bone to pick remains. GMO is not without downside, and people cheering for it without a hint of scepticism reeks ignorance and unwillingness to learn from past mistakes that were made in the name of science.
As you've highlighted, said technique was used for decades, for the detriment of soil health, bees and all kinds of smaller organisms, without it being questioned.
As for your last paragraph, I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that voicing these 'uneducated' opinions about GMO simply pushes the crops to incognito mode, making them less visible for consumers? Better to see your killer face-to-face than being stabbed to the back? Not sure about that.
Of course it has, Bayer just tried to ditch the bad brand image:
> The closing sets the stage for the 117-year-old agribusiness brand name “Monsanto” to be dropped by Bayer. Monsanto’s efforts to promote genetically modified crops have been the subject of much controversy from anti-GMO activists, and the U.S. company has spent millions of dollars over the years on brand and corporate ad campaigns to improve its overall image.
It's now called Bayer Crop Science Division and does the same thing.
Are you also outraged if someone says Facebook instead of Meta, although the social network is just one of the products from the company called Meta today?
There is a useful tell here when someone uses the old name for the wrong purpose, it can be a flag that the person is possibly operating under old information. Anyways, if you want to remove all ambiguity and also signal that you know and aren't falling for the rebrand as reputation washing, just mention them both: Meta nee Facebook, Bayer nee Monsanto
Monsanto was bought by Bayer in 2018. Its brand disappeared, but its products continue.
Although I'm not sure it's great branding when the maker of Roundup is bought by the maker of Zyklon B.
> bad wrap they've gotten from science ignorants
Science is not about blind trust. How many times have scientists discovered wondrous new things like asbestos, Thalidomide, leaded gasoline, teflon, only to take decades to realize the consequences?
Even if we blindly trust science, there are various other issues like: patenting life, monopolization, reducing genetic diversity, GMO cross-pollination, &c.
In what way?
> various other issues like: patenting life, monopolization, reducing genetic diversity, GMO cross-pollination
Agree these are all terrible, but nothing there is GMO-specific. That's all either bad agricultural practices like mono-cropping that can be done with any crop, or societal problems related to intellectual property or markets.
> In what way?
Because they're the exact equivalent of closed source in software.
There would be means to research, produce and use GMOs in good ways, but the way our economics work, they can't be used without either harming natural ones and/or involving NDAs, lawyers and all sort of things that in some contexts make closed source a nightmare for pretty much everyone except those selling it.
GMOs are a very complicated topic, and I can see both sides of the argument having some merit. Proving that new things don't actively do harm (both short- _and_ long-term) should be required before they go to market (or they should have to have very strong warning labels about being untested).
100% agreed that AI is like early industrialization in that we don’t even know the messes we’re creating, and wild excess is likely to haunt us.
But GMO foods are the opposite: people feeling “uneasy” is not an indication of harm. All foods are GMO. People are just uncomfortable with the modifications being in a lab rather than over thousands of generations of selective breeding. The side effects of GMOs are the same as side effects of selectively bred food. There is no magic.
There's no point in having strict rules on food ingredients and labelling if manufacturers are allowed to, in effect, include any chemical whatsoever that can be built biologically: all they have to do is genetically engineer it into wheat (say) and write "wheat" in the ingredients. And the consumer has no idea what they're getting.
I suggest you do more research on the benefits and risks of GMOs from more reputable sources. From my understanding, the primary risks of GMOs are less to do with human health and more about environmental risks, such as creating superweeds that can outcompete native plants or negeative effects on soil microbes.
Can you source those claims?
Most of the dunking on people who hate GMOs always feels like reactionary garbage, basically people desperately trying to feel smarter than the "unenlightened housewives". It always has such a condescending patronizing tone, as if being queasy about multibillion dollar corporations directly meddling in natural processes using extremely new technologies to increase their own profit isn't a terrifying concept. No, science never has had unintended consequences, their feelings are just invalid.
Is there a even a remote chance that say bits of Mammalian dna ends up in a crop via natural selection? The economic issues around GMOs are clear. The biosphere impact is not clear and there are questions: what can happen if we introduce new vectors in ecologies that have evolved over many orders of magnitude longer timelines?
The “unease” comes from the knowledge that in Nature there is always a reaction to an action. And the nature of this natural reaction (which will unfold in time, just like humans picking up agriculture) is not fully understood. It is a reasonable (read: ~substantiated) emotional response, imo.
Via natural selection alone? Probably not. Through horizontal gene transfer e.g. via viruses? Sure, can't see why not.
Yes?
Half of your DNA is shared with plants already!
You already live in that world.
The same is true, perhaps even more so, for our information diet. It defines our reality.
AI already is drowning out human made content on websites for creatives. Aided in no small part with their curator's malicious insistence to not label their posts as AI generated. It's only going to get worse as AI art becomes better.
a very apt analogy perhaps in a way you didn't intend. it makes people uneasy, there's a natural reaction towards the unnatural, maybe for emotional reasons. it's the same way with GMO crops and AI poems—they will not be able to tell the difference between actual creativity and "artificial artefacts"/"random statistical noise", but they're supposed to have mystical difference. One authentic, the other inauthentic. One that is actually good, and one that merely tricks you into thinking it is good. But don't attempt to scientifically determine if there's any difference... you'll be disappointed.
And that's before considering monocultivar risks which are well understood and the underhanded ways gmos are handled by corporations, which are well documented.
As a human, my reaction may still be emotional, but it's based on evidence.
Produced at scale, durable, easily distributed, enticing flavor, if it's actually any good for eating is far down the list of priorities when devising these things, as its effects are noticed far after purchase.
That seems like an odd thing to point out to me.
More people is not an obviously positive thing for us or the planet. And we have enough food and wealth for everyone as it is. If feeding more people were the priority, it could be addressed in other ways. I think the primary motive behind GMO is increased control and profit. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there's a whitewashed motive as well.
It's also ridiculous to just hand wave away crop productivity improvements with "but we already have enough food." We aren't going to revolutionize global food distribution any time soon, but we can do things that have concrete impact right now. We're also losing land to agriculture far too fast, particularly in the amazon. We need to be decreasing the amount of land used by agriculture, and GMOs are a very powerful tool in that interest.
GMOs need to be regulated, and I think the IP regime that Monsanto is protected by should be struct down (not that I expect that any time soon). But please don't wave away the entire discussion with strawman arguments.
What strawman argument? I was responding specifically to the point I quoted that feeding more people is important. And I made a couple of points specifically against that position. So where's the straw?
> Today, it's self-evident to us as consumers when a product is cheap, low-quality, manufactured garbage from China.
Correct.
> In many cases we can choose to spend more and buy a handmade or custom version of the product we want.
Not quite. It's increasingly hard to find a version of a product that's not low-quality garbage - the expensive option is often just the cheap option with extra markup for those who got fooled by marketing, or naively believe companies still care about their brands.
That's the unexpected side effect that, I feel, people still mostly failed to realize: because running a company and manufacturing anything has nontrivial costs, letting the market race to the bottom hollows out the middle. You're left with a bunch of specialty vendors who make quality goods for other businesses or governments, at ridiculous prices, and the low-quality throwaway garbage for everyone else. The "more expensive, reasonable quality" product group disappears - the vendors move either into low-quality crap or too-expensive-for-individuals specialty items (or sometimes both), as the middle can't compete with either end.
I imagine the threat of AI-generated content to be similar: as it completely blows the bottom across creative industry, it will hollow it out. Skilled creators will, when they can, move to the high-end Big Art, where you pay more for the work's provenance than for the enjoyment itself, because they won't be able to afford competing with somewhat worse but much cheaper AI-generated shovel-art.
(Also relevant is that regular people are usually as good at distinguishing between crap and good products as they're at distinguishing between crap and good art.)
What's extra annoying is that companies are burning brands on this, and as they're transitioning from selling quality goods to peddling cheap crap, they of course don't tell you about it. Instead, you see metal being swapped for plastics, screws for glue, assembly being worse and worse - while their marketing departments double down on highlighting how pretty, modern, quality and smart this years' model is.
I've actually started building my own furniture from raw wood etc. just because it's impossible to find anything that costs less than $1000 that isn't just cardboard and MDF with a veneer. At least with furniture there's a market for "solid wood". But in so many other industries you get to pick between $3 garbage in a $0.20 box for $5, and $3 garbage in a $5 box for $20.
The analogy to GMOs seems more connected to the self-replicating nature than to any potential health side effects.
I only fear that there won't be enough profit motive for such gatekeeping/curation, which would only happen if very few people were willing to spend more money for human generated content. I can see this potentially not happening, either because the tech advances to quickly for people to even tell the difference, or people do realize but don't care because the AI learns to feed them exactly what they want(exactly what's happening with a lot of BS "news" already). Or maybe a decent group of people do see the value in real content, and pay for it, but the majority still remains oblivious or indifferent, and the effect it has on this majority is still enough to influence the direction of the world negatively enough that even those groups who avoid it will be forced to accept the consequences of living in a world created by AI and the majority of other people
In the future we might knowingly consume AI-generated cheap text for some purposes and opt for "the real thing" in other cases. Just like I buy manufactured wood furniture from Target for the spare bedroom, but not for things I want to keep forever.
The interesting thing is that a boom in AI-generated content makes gatekeepers like traditional publishers more relevant after two decades of decline. The narrative of the internet has always been the democratization of content, information, and news. Now, we might find that a stamp of approval has specific value. A publisher can promise that some certain content for medicine or engineering was not generated by AI. Whether fraud also exists is a different question.
Another way I'm thinking about it is with GMO food. GMO food supporters point out that GMOs help us feed more people, but it still makes others uneasy. Maybe there's a similar story with AI content. It makes some content cheaper, but what are the side effects?