so they can do whatever they want with it and the actual owners/authors have no chance to really influence Reddit at all to make it crawlable. (the GDPR-like data takeout is nice, but ... completely useless in these cases where the value is in the composition and aggregation with other users' content.)

Is there a way to export my history? How?

(and there's some help article for it that I didn't read, but google found this first https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004304835... that's how I got to the link)

Anyway, you basically submit a request and then later they will email you a link to a zip file that contains a free dozen CSV files with unescaped newlines. One for all the comments you made, one for up/down-votes, one for blocked users, etc.

When I am answering some random dude on reddit with a problem I want that dude to read my solution. I don't want this to be crawled and forever stored (probably deanonymized) or enshrined in a dozen commercial LLMs. There is substack for that stuff.

In the end, I view potential AGI's as a common consciousness brainchild.

Endless iterations of the discussion about how copyright should/shouldn't be are meaningless without considering the larger social context.

The vast majority of creators (artists!?) are not compensated at all, and the users' (content consumers'? the public's?) attention is already 100% fully saturated.

So GenAI chrurning out more kitsch hardly changes that. (It got popular when it was novel, and ... that was it for now. And it became one more brush in the evergrowing workshop.)

And if/when a company creates a product out of it, then that product needs to be scrutinized and we should consider the ethical, social, and political problems. (Because ... politics is a blunt tool whereas ethics is as infinitely nuanced as we make it, whereas actual social considerations ought to be pragmatic and fair.)

And that's the problem. Users benefit from cheaper access to customized content. (In other words, arguably it's a net positive thing that they can - for example - ask some GenAI tool to make them a nice picture for their friend's birthday.) So what's the cost of this? Does it make some people jobless? Is that good or bad? (Is it good that plant breeding programs, fertilizers, tractors, and irrigation systems made a lot of agricultural workers jobless? Well, in some sense yes as allows a few people to feed many, freeing up time for others to become doctors and artists. In some sense bad, because our current socioeconomic system does not provide real social support - despite enormous redistribution of GDP. [Because brutal inefficiencies in allocation of that surplus. And that's again a political problem.])

... and of course here the status quo bias leads to "technological progress chipping away at inefficiencies" in a capitalist reality translates to "even more things get commoditized", and that in turn in the current shitty socioeconomic system equals "lots of externalities are not priced in, and lots of people are forced to drastically change their lives to adjust to new prices" (ie. price of their labor and/or products going down, so they need to change jobs, yet they barely get any support for doing so) ... and of course ethically it's bad that most people virtually uncritically accept and enjoy the results of progress (new products and services) without giving a fuck about the costs.

very arguably yeah. we evolve to where we push a button and get a birthday present. the logical conclusion is a system that does not even require to push a button. this is the opposite of the original point (spend time and effort making something to show you care). so to me it is not benefit, it is harm.

maybe you picked a bad example. but the examples of legit benefits of this tech, they don't turn into harms if you really analyze it and go to the root, are hard to find in consumer land.

So by spending the same 20 minutes fiddling with some kind of graphics if the outcome becomes 10x better then I see that as an advantage. (That said I haven't tried this.)

Basically this is "exactly" that kind of capability that we already seen in "artist paints kid's drawing" [0] just commoditized. And this is where I (as a user) would be looking for the style transfer. Because I saw something famous/trendy/fancy/aesthetically-pleasing and now want to imitate it as a gag for this hypothetical birthday card. (Sure, copyright already doesn't care if I download someone's famous photo, and cut my friends head out from a photo I made, and put the head part on the copyrighted photo. Yet it was a straightforward derivative work. Just it's not commercial, damages are none, or even negative, ie. the artist benefits from that famous exposure! :D)

> legit benefits of this tech

I wanted to try to find an example that could apply to a lot of users. Because as awesome as using GenAI to generate Lean proofs (and then add a feedback loop by actually running the generated code through Lean) to solve Math Olympiad problems [1], it's not really an everyday thing.

> we evolve to where we push a button and get a birthday present. the logical conclusion is a system that does not even require to push a button.

Well, maybe! In no time we'll board the Axios and just chill. [2] But at the same time crafts and DIY and experiences (tourism, festivals, concerts) are ridiculously popular. (And it has its own problems. [3])

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB-Q0eNsUaQ KID'S ART Redrawn by a PROFESSIONAL ARTIST! - Ep.6

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41069829

[2] https://www.thelist.com/img/gallery/things-only-adults-notic...

[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/08/travel/barcelona-tourism-...

This was sarcasm. That system would never happen. If birthday card requires no effort it is worse than nothing, literal noise.

> So by spending the same 20 minutes fiddling with some kind of graphics if the outcome becomes 10x better then I see that as an advantage. (That said I haven't tried this.)

Feels like you misunderstood. It is not "10x better" or "advantage" because literally the easier it was for you the less it is valuable.

... why? The closer I can approximate my imagined output (in a fixed time) the more value I see in it. The tool provides the added value.

We have better cameras than 30 years ago. Better pictures. It's easier to make a better photo in the same amount of time. I would be happier if my old blurry photos would be better.

Value is relative, of course, that's why exchange/trade works, right? And the same applies here too, with the added complications of explicitly "unknowable price", after all I don't know apriori how much value my friend will assign to the card!

In general there are many situations that map closer to your understanding than mine, but I think you are dismissing also a lot of perfectly valid ones where your model simply doesn't apply.

For example if said friend values effort, but "apparent concept vs. actual results fidelity" is not part of effort for them.

Yet still we don't know if they value effort as in time spent (because if they value time spent then it's the same value in both of my scenarios) or if they value some "visible handcraftedness" (effort to produce something that I am known to be very amateur at). And even then the question arises, isn't picking the best tool for the job itself effort?

Of course if this friend simply abbors GenAI shit then they will think it's "low effort" even if I put hours and hours into it (that I wouldn't have put into a traditional image manipulation software, because there I realized soon that I would need months of learning, etc.)

can also say every humans are leech benefiting off free software (creators) and complaining about their worthless chitchat, barely usable because of its basic semantics, being "stolen".