deborah

To be clear, I was critiquing his smug intolerance to be people who don’t meet his standards of so-called leftist perfection, when he, himself, is as complex as anyone else. I was not critiquing his being married or his living under capitalism.

When I was listening to the most recent episode of the Maintenance Phase podcast which was all in on mocking J. Michael Bailey with a special dig at autogynephilia theories, I went to go see if David had any history policing weirdos on Bailey’s wikipedia page, as an excuse to bring the episode in for a stubsack link. And he didn’t, which means, once again, booring.

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.

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.)

Sorry, I’m American, I’ve forgotten how normal human empathy works. I’ve heard that in some places society isn’t entirely driven by spite but I think that’s a myth.

oh god is it from that messed up OCD plot line in one of the bad ones – Xenocide? – which I’d forgotten about until just now? I guess if someone has an OCD diagnosis you could imagine taking that as a reclamation…

Ben Stewart:

Manifest’s decisions are and have been bad not in terms of PR, but bad for its own epistemics, the forecasting community, EA, and basic human decency.

TW:

“Basic human decency”? Jeez, mate. I understand not wanting to engage with right-wingers personally, but treating it as a deep affront when others choose to do so is off-putting, to say the least.

Ben Stewart:

Yeah that was a bit strong, sorry late here.

Ben, honey. You do not have to apologize for referring to platforming Hanania as an affront to basic human decency. That TW is successful in shaming you for accurately identifying what happened here is no credit to your own ability to recognize the dangerous epistemic bubble in which you find yourself, or the cultlike social pressures that persuade you to distrust your own correct judgement – not because TW challenged your facts or your interpretation, but because he – gasp! – called it “off-putting.”

Not everyone’s going to like you. Not everyone’s going to agree with you. Social stigma is a good and correct tool in your toolbox when a member of your community says that cites-the-Turner-Diaries, enforced-sterilization, anti-“miscegenation”, “women’s liberation = the end of human civilization” Richard Hanania has something valuable to add.

He also wants us to know that Hannania is much less right than he’s made out to be

Also he doesn’t grasp that people hate Hanania because he’s a racist, not because of where he falls on the forced left/right spectrum.

One of the things that happened during the Great Low Interest Rates Decades is that it seems like anyone who fit a certain profile (millennial white guy with american citizenship, a computer, and at least a modicum of what passes for charm among the nerd elite) could convince both VCs and the US government that there was tons of money in disrupting the delivery of some legacy sector of society. Sometimes they were correct (eg. buying stuff without going to a retail establishment), sometimes it seems like they should have been correct and yet somehow have failed to make money anyway (Uber), mostly they were comical (Juicero). But the ones that are the most excruciating are all the places where you really, really can’t frictionlessly deliver at scale, because large-scale human intervention is necessary: education, health care, customer service.

The promise of the American tech boom is massive online delivery without people. Employers hate their employees, and government is always willing to be told that doing without employees is industrial progress.

Isn’t this normal with jobs? That there is a month of tryout period?

I have never found this to be normal with jobs, no. But in the US, most employment is at-will, so you can be fired without cause at any time.

(I’ve encountered probation windows where benefits don’t kick in for 3-6 months, and that’s hideous in a country without single payer health care, but never a tryout period.)