I try not to guess what motivates complex animals such as humans when in an abstract discussion like “what motivates Sam Altman”. Do you have any inside knowledge of what motivates him or are you guessing because you have correlated things you don’t like with a company or individual?

I try not to guess what motivates complex animals such as humans when in an abstract discussion like “what motivates teenagers”. Do you have any inside knowledge of what motivates them or are you guessing because you have correlated things you don’t like with a certain demographic?

Not trying to be inflammatory, but it's not really about teenagers, or about OpenAI's intentions. We can look at what they are doing.

One group is downloading things other people made, sometimes transforming them - but we certainly haven't seen an explosion of remixes at the scale of OpenAI creations. The other group, OpenAI, makes tools that ingest copyrighted material and enable people to make a huge number of more complex transformations than the original "remix" culture, where the inputs are usually quite visible.

FWIW, I don't even really think the content pirates have as terrible a name as in GP's comment. I certainly have no criticism of them, especially considering that's how I got my start in technology. It's fine, it's just not as cool or as widespread as GenAI.

>but we certainly haven't seen an explosion of remixes at the scale of OpenAI creations.

yeah we have. It's just that there was no Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Tiktok/Vine/Youtube/Reddit and 20 other sites with more people on them today than there were on the internet 20 years prior. But if you browsed the Livejournals and other relics of the early 00's these aren't hard to find at a proportional mass. This drove a lot of MySpace to the point where the post-Tom era chose to try and pivot into the music service angle over a Facebook competitor. And a lot of that was possible thanks to being able to easily access rips of CD's.

Ironically enough, the main thing holding back music from being as profitable as photos was the music industry itself. They were so aggressive in shaping copyright and hoarding everything into Vevo that they lost billions as new media shaped itself. Squandering talent instead of grabbing that talent for themselves to profit from, trying to remain the trend setter instead of expand or leaning into emergent genres, surrendering that waning control to a subscription service (which consistently remains unprofitable) instead of themselves establishing a platform to profit from (from in-house talent and indies alike). So many missteps and it ends in artists no longer being able to make money from the music themselves.

>The other group, OpenAI, makes tools that ingest copyrighted material and enable people to make a huge number of more complex transformations than the original "remix" culture, where the inputs are usually quite visible.

under what metric? It's weird to talk about "remix culture" and argue that AI can transform it futher... at which point it's no longer a remix and arguably an original song. Which people already do.

Some artists are fine focusing on remixing, but remixing for others is a step towards building the talent to make their own music, and hopefully the remixes establish a brand others want to follow.

>It's fine, it's just not as cool or as widespread as GenAI.

I don't think any people starting their careers in tech in the 90's-early '10's would be here if "cool" was a preliminary for their happiness.