All of us are waiting for the bubble to burst but will it actually affect anything? I think AI has already done so much irreversible damage to Interest & Society(Kinda). I have seen YouTube channels with 100K subs who create AI Slops(Music, Short stupid essay), Xhitter account which have more than 100K followers which pump out good enough art. Even if bubbles burst these tools will go nowhere. Every day I wake up I feel much shittier. I need to puke. I am seeing everything I love getting ruined by soulless bot or greedy humans who don't love art/music/story etc. I am sounding like a boomer but I am in my early 20s actually. I go to reddit there are Pro AI people laughing at us calling us Luddite or "Decel". I have no hope most of you guys are old folk. I want to leave this fast paced world & go do farming at my hometown. Reading Books made by humans and watching some movies made by humans in a week without caring about this whole hellhole. I was so passionate about computer engineering I really loved technology. I was one of the early adopters of Gen AI who loved Midjounery because it was new & looked kinda magical to me now it looks like the most dystopian shit human yet created. I now resent my degree. I am a replaceable human who has no value. Human evolutioned much just to be replaced by some bots so I can do more slavery for corpo lords who believe that capital is ever growing like a cancer cell.
It will help erase the notion that any of these companies are too big to fail and thus above the law and beyond regulation.
These tools can and should be regulated like everything else. Laws and regulations don't make things impossible, they simply disincentivize bad behavior by putting a real cost (money, time, or in some cases, life itself) on them.
I think we have finally reached a point where nobody in their right mind would try to argue that training generative AI to create an infinite supply of slop should be considered "fair use", even under existing laws. And so a big part of making AI more fair and functional within our existing society would be to simply have it follow existing laws. For example:
Illegally trained models will, of course, still exist out there on the net. But using those will no longer be considered legal or legitimate in the business world, and could open people/corporations up to serious legal liability.
You are not alone in this, and yeah, it can be very disheartening. It's entirely possible we may be entering a new cultural dark are where art and human creativity are not valued by the masses. Like Nietzche saying "god is dead", part of me truly believes that "art is dead", replaced by palatable corporate AI slop.
However... the death of art and culture among the masses doesn't mean that we have to be devoid of art and culture as individuals. We have the ability to make caring about art and culture a core part of our own philosophy. We have the agency to create our own subculture where cool people continue to be rewarded for making interesting human works. We can, and should, still embrace humanity.
I'm not sure many of the people on reddit are even people these days. How many posts and comments over there are probably written by bots? And even among the real people on reddit, how many of them even have opinions that are worth a shit? Would we listen to these people if we ran into them on the street? In many cases, probably not...
I do recommend touching grass, creating your own physical and digital media library, self-hosting your own services, and embracing traditional arts again. Buy a watercolor set, learn to play an instrument, broaden your horizons outside of the digital realm.
As a programmer myself, I can resonate with this a lot.
At the same time, technology isn't to blame for our current situation, corporate greed is. Machine learning has existed in theory and practice for decades. The big innovation of today's AI is theft. Like the Borg from Star Trek, assimilating everything in sight without consent for the benefit of the corporate machine.
But technology can also help us fight back.
Open source software allows us to put the power of technology into the hands of everyday people for free. The fediverse allows us to regain control over the internet and the means of communication. And even things like AI could theoretically be used to undermine corporate software (for example, AI-assisted decompilation of binaries) and even existing AI models (for example, increasingly sophisticated AI data poisoning techniques).
This fight is nowhere close to being over. We still need you on our side.
OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a month. Nobody wants to buy or consumer slop content. The novelty of all of this stuff is beginning to fade for most people. Legal questions have still not been fully answered. And technology can be used against corporations, too.
This is a really great response! Well written and very hopeful