"Good artists copy; great artists steal"

-Pablo Picasso

There's this magic phrase that makes all the difference: at scale.

People scale. There's billions of us. And we compete.

AIs scale faster. Just one instance can do the work of billions of people, and have its owner profit off it.

How can the owner profit off something that is "free" to make for anyone? Mass spamming is hard to achieve with current day social networks.

Mass spamming is the very raison d'etre for social network companies. It goes by different names though - "sponsored content", "fanpages", "influencers", etc.

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.

That seems like saying a steam shovel is bad because it moves dirt at scale. Machines do increase the reach of people, that is exactly what they are for.

This false equivalency just keeps being made.

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

Machines -- at least today -- are extensions of human beings, and pretty democratic, really, compared to history. You can't really talk about limiting machines without also limiting humans. GPT is a tool. Almost anyone can use tools much like it. So what are we trying to protect against?

Yes. Machines including GPT are not the ones doing things, they can't be compared to humans. And humans may desire to do things with machines that should not be considered acceptable because of how they affect human society, and humans may or should be limited (as they already are in all aspects of life that involve other humans).

He writeth best who stealeth best, all things both great and small.

For greater minds that wrote them first, from nature stole them all.

-- Totally me.

I like that phrase! I'm probably going to steal it :-)

Now that joke time is over, I'll disclose that it seems to be attributed to one Robert E. D. Cattley, in here: http://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/20/science/homer-s-sea-wine-d...