deborah
You’re thinking of my brother, Zathras.
He says some pretty ignorant stuff in this post that undercuts his argument, though:
Here’s the problem: establishing that AI training requires a copyright license will not stop AI from being used to erode the wages and working conditions of creative workers. The companies suing over AI training are also notorious exploiters of creative workers, union-busters and wage-stealers. They don’t want to get rid of generative AI, they just want to get paid for the content used to create it. Their use-case for gen AI is the same as Openai’s CTO’s use-case: get rid of creative jobs and pay less for creative labor.
This isn’t hypothetical. Remember last summer’s actor strike? The sticking point was that the studios wanted to pay actors a single fee to scan their bodies and faces, and then use those scans instead of hiring those actors, forever, without ever paying them again. Does it matter to an actor whether the AI that replaces you at Warner, Sony, Universal, Disney or Paramount (yes, three of the Big Five studios are also the Big Three labels!) was made by Openai without paying the studios for the training material, or whether Openai paid a license fee that the studios kept?
The writers’ and actors’ strikes, in an overwhelmingly unionized workforce, did not say “hey, we as a labor force want a cut of the dirty GPT lucre”. Instead, they said not today, satan to studios working with GenAI at all. And won. Those writers and actors, who are overwhelmingly huge supporters of copyright and moral rights, defeated the rich assholes at the Big Five not by throwing up their hands and giving all their creative output to the glurge machine, but by unionizing and painful, hard-won solidarity.
Whether SAG-AFTRA and the AFM (or non US equivalents) can organize as effectively for musicians and lyricists is unclear. But Cory, who claims to be a leftist, is defaulting to “you as a musician should work for free” and not “you as a musician should organize to counter the power of capital”, and that’s about as leftist as Grimes posing with The Communist Manifesto.
oh lord I cannot imagine how they would torment nexus the tao te ching.
…wait yes I can. they’d decide that LLMs are the tao. “What’s perfectly whole seems flawed, but you can use it forever.” “To know without knowing is best.” “If those in power could hold to the Way, the ten thousand things would look after themselves.”
Doctorow’s had some pretty bad takes, honestly, for all I agree with him on some things. His review of Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger – a book which explores conspiracy theories and how they capture people – reduces the entire book, incorrectly, to his own political soapbox:
Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal.
This is, frankly, juvenile. Not every bad thing in the world can be mapped on to one’s particular soapboxes. Treating GenAI as Good because Copyright is Bad is exactly in character for him.
(Also Cory gets smug about releasing his novels CC, as if all working writers can do that, but I’m sure it helps the family finances that his wife is an executive at Disney. It’s great to use money from one of copyright’s biggest monsters to act self-righteous about other people trying to make a living.)