This is not that. We're not talking about some inane mashup, but a wholesale digestion of every creative thing any person ever did by a monster computer cluster whose scale dwarfs imagination, which then promptly uses it to maximize "engagement" to gather eyeballs to feed them advertising. It's profoundly messed up.

The cost of that computer cluster must also dwarf imagination.

I don't begrudge crypto miners either.

I wasn't aware of a right to recoup the costs of any bad idea, which seems to be what you're implying here. Because computers, therefore profit? Huh?

The earlier comment was "vast work", so the size of effort is somehow relevant to the discussion.

It isn't. If a serial killer spent a week digging mass graves by hand, they don't get years taken off their sentence. You don't get points just for working hard or spending money, particularly when it cheapens or just appropriates other people's work.

> which then promptly uses it to maximize "engagement" to gather eyeballs to feed them advertising.

This is the real problem, right? People don't dislike generative AI, they dislike the attention economy. Yet I see more disgust towards AI than the company policies which suck. I don't understand why.

Oh, haha, yeah. I guess I'm the opposite--I actually like AI more than the attention economy! At least one of them is not actively trying to drain my brainpower and skill set and get my to buy stuff and do stuff I wouldn't otherwise buy or do.

yet

I think it is more that art, film and music have largely been replaced with complaining online about various subjects as the major form of entertainment in America.

People also differentiate heavily on the basis of scale and profit. Artists are often fine with people sharing their posts and may even tolerate someone asking for permission to make printouts or whatever else for their circle of friends, but will expect some sort of royalty if you're asking to be able to sell prints of their artwork on a store.

Hell, even with viral videos it's relatively common that normal people can share away while entertainment companies and influencers are expected to pay for a license.

With memes it isn't clear exactly who made the first template, and the creation of them doesn't revolve around specific people in the same way, nor are they meaningfully tied to profits.

When creators post their content online to be shared, they do it with the focus being on reaching individuals, not for it to be sucked up by soulless companies to extract all value without the intention of giving back.

> With memes it isn't clear exactly who made the first template.

The Office, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Django Unchained, Game of Thrones, etc

These works have identifiable creators.

The conversation is quickly devolving into a vacuum of ignorance where things like royalties, fair use policies, revenue-sharing agreements, parodies, sampling, etc, have apparently never been thought about.

We're not talking about any of those things. We're talking about wholesale digestion of the entirety of human knowledge by automated means, which is now not just theoretically possible, but routine.

Those aren't meme formats in terms of what is typically meant by meme.