Technology

It's interesting as it's many of the MPAA/RIAA attitudes towards Napster/BitTorrent but now towards gen AI.

I think it reflects the generational shift in who considers themselves content creators. Tech allowed for the long tail to become profitable content producers, so now there's a large public audience that sees this from what's historically been a corporate perspective.

Of course, they are making the same mistakes because they don't know their own history and thus are doomed to repeat it.

They are largely unaware that the MPAA/RIAA fighting against online sharing of media meant they ceded the inevitable tech to other companies like Apple and Netflix that developed platforms that navigated the legality alongside the tech.

So for example right now voice actors are largely opposing gen AI rather than realizing they should probably have their union develop or partner for their own owned offering which maximizes member revenues off of usage and can dictate fair terms.

In fact, the only way many of today's mass content creators have platforms to create content is because the corporate fights to hold onto IP status quo failed with platforms like YouTube, etc.

Gen AI should exist in a social construct such that it is limited in being able to produce copyrighted content. But policing training/education of anything (human or otherwise) doesn't serve us and will hold back developments that are going to have much more public good than most people seem to realize.

Also, it's unfortunate that we've effectively self propagandized for nearly a century around 'AI' being the bad guy and at odds with humanity, misaligned with our interests, an existential threat, etc. There's such an incredible priming bias right now that it's effectively become the Boogeyman rather than correctly being identified as a tool that - like every other tool in human history - is going to be able to be used for good or bad depending on the wielder (though unlike past tools this one may actually have a slight inherent and unavoidable bias towards good as Musk and Gab recently found out with their AI efforts on release denouncing their own personally held beliefs).