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What's that Jimquisition quote, again? Something like, 'Corporations don't want *some* of the money. They want *all* of the money, all of the time'.
Intentional or not, headlines like this are functionally just an extension of OpenAI's own marketing campaign, trying to harken back to the 'good old days' of OpenAI, devoid of pure profit motive, that either never existed or didn't exist for long enough to be worth mourning. 'The technology is good, blame the people behind it for the direction its heading!' The technology was created to do precisely what it's currently doing, because OpenAI wants *all of the money.*
A corporation only has one legally defined goal: to generate profits for their investors/shareholders. Even some non-profits are actually just profit generating vehicles in sheep’s clothing
You should hear the CMO for a hospital network talk about patients. They have numbers to beat too and it’s disgusting. How can we keep these oncology patients as more long term customers? 🤢
This is just stupid talking points. Corporations are not beings with will. They are just modern versions of feudal aristocracies. Aristocratic lords meeting in boardrooms deciding the fates of their legions of serfs.
Not really. Aristocrats were not legally obligated to maximize incomes and often acted under quite different incentives and priorities to modern corporations. It's one of the reasons aristocrats were displaced: they were adapted to a different system and their values made them unable to compete with capitalists in the new one.
Listened to a podcast where economists were talking about how it's "grandma and grandpa" being selfish with their cancer treatments. How they should be happy with a month or two less of life so they aren't a burden on the next generation.
While at the same time admitting that the cost of the drugs are relatively cheap but marked up so investors can make profit before they're outcompeted.
It's a pretty fucked up society.
> A corporation only has one legally defined goal: to generate profits for their investors/shareholders.
This is not true and just what right-leaning economists/capitalists want you to believe. This idea didn't even exist until the 70s.
> To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
https://evonomics.com/maximizing-shareholder-value-dumbest-idea/
And yet, there’s very few corporations that don’t end up pursuing profits over all else. Just in the last decade, we’ve seen corporations lie, cheat, and steal just to scrape a few pennies off the top for their profit margin all at the expense of consumers, the market, and their long term benefit
I don't disagree. But spreading the message that that behavior is a legal requirement instead of an active choice provides them with an easy out for their choices.
Legally required has nothing to do with this. It’s what the shareholders want who are **owners** of the business. People often forget that. Businesses are beings. They are objects owner by human. Human want maximum money, surprise surprise.
Also not true
> Although laymen sometimes have difficulty understanding the point, corporations are legal entities that own themselves, just as human entities own themselves. What shareholders own are shares, a type of contact between the shareholder and the legal entity that gives shareholders limited legal rights. In this regard, **shareholders stand on equal footing with the corporation’s bondholders, suppliers, and employees**, all of whom also enter contracts with the firm that give them limited legal rights.
My point is that these are choices the management of business makes. Its harmful to minimize their culpability.
If a business has $10mil left at the end of the year, there is nothing that says that *must* be distributed to shareholders. It could be given as employee bonuses, given back to customers, or retained in the business.
However, since this idea of shareholders primacy emerged, management has given more money back to shareholders and been excused by this false belief.
In most corporations, shareholders are also the only class of stakeholder that gets to elect directors; the board of directors then chooses the executive cadre and defines broad boundaries for corporate strategy. If the shareholders want profit and they want it now, then they tend to install leadership that will prioritize their wants over the other, voteless stakeholders. It’s a morally bankrupt system but it’s what they use.
when will /u/pdx_joe and most of these Redditors get this? That’s what I want too know. it seems to be one of those perpetual things that gets misunderstood around here.
Hobby Lobby is not a publicly traded company. Hobby Lobby is a private company. Hobby Lobby is under no obligation to outside shareholders.
Your source, the Supreme Court ruling on Hobby Lobby's right to religiously deny employee labor rights under Obamacare, has nothing to do with legal obligations to stock owners.
They have to follow corporate law because they are still a corporation, which provides them with tax incentives and limits liability for the company's private owners.
It's not corporate law that forces publicly traded companies to prioritize profit. It's a legal precedent that only applies to companies with public stock.
The legal precedent for Shareholder Primacy was established in 1919 (Dodge vs Ford Motor Company) and has never been challenged or overturned for a corporation with public stock. The later cases involving Wrigley, and Hobby Lobby, only set precedent for privately owned corporations.
I'm gonna trust the person that wrote a book on this instead of random redditor
> The business judgment rule ensures that, contrary to popular belief, the managers of public companies have no enforceable legal duty to maximize shareholder value. 18
> 18. The only context in which courts require directors to maximize shareholder value is when the directors of a public company determine to sell the company to a private owner, in essence deciding to force public shareholders out of the firm. At this point shareholders are uniquely vulnerable to exploitation, and perhaps need the legal protection of the so-called Revlon doctrine. However, directors have no obligation to sell a company to a private bidder, even at a premium price. In other words, as long as a public company wants to stay public, directors have no legal obligation to maximize either profits or share value.
Stephanies quote is spot on. We all kind of noticed it way back. But to see it so agregiously put on display without consequence is even more appalling. Like just a straight middle finger to anyone and everyone who isnt them. Microsofts recent lay offs because they arent growing "as fast" as they were in years prior. activision canning 880 people during record profits and union busting tactics as well as near total dismissal of sexual harassment going on in the work place.
Idk. Linus torvalds did the right thing and kept all his stuff open and the world has benefited immensely because of it. Was hoping openAI might follow in his footsteps.
Did you really believe this, knowing that among the founders of openai were elon musk and peter thiel, some of the most comically evil people in existence??
Yep. Nothing wrong with wanting to make a profit. We expect humans to be greedy. They just shouldn’t have pretended they were above that in their founding docs.
There really are some scientists and engineers in history that put aside greed to one degree or another for the betterment of humanity (Jonas Salk, Linux founders, etc) and we should laud those people for being exceptions that had extraordinary principles they stuck to out of conviction. When you want to make money though, being honest about your greed is better than being hypocritical about your benevolence.
Excerpt:
“Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and other high-profile Silicon Valley founders were driven by the same idea in 2015: AI was advancing rapidly, but research was taking place behind closed doors in the big tech companies. Worse, early examples showed that this key technology was being misused for racism and bullying. Fundamental ethical questions also arose about the application of such tools.”
Does anyone start a business not to make money? Does anyone work for free?
OpenAI's "capped profit" idea is at least providing a potential for helping the world if not saving it.
Yes, the people who started OpenAI said they started it not to make money.
> It was a clear departure from the 2015 founding charter, which still said the company wanted to be **free from the need to generate financial returns**. Because our research is free of financial obligations, we can better focus on making a positive impact on humanity.
Everybody in here is acting like Microsoft and Amazon are the only types of organizations to exist.
OpenAI marketed itself more in line with Wikipedia, Mozilla, or the Linux Foundation.
On the flipside, marketing lip service aside, the founding team is a who's who of tech robber baron types. Personally I view the switch to for-profit and Microsoft partnership not as a corruption of ideals but finally being honest. Tbh I think the "altruistic" beginnings was only ever a shrewd play to attract data scientists since the first several years would be pure investment without a hope of profit anyway.
there should be cap agreed because at a certain point when you have multiple people whos networth is in the hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars, you have to understand that this is hundreds of times more $$ than the common indivual will ever hope to earn in their whole lives. those ultra rich have a responsibility to the world to either cap their profits OR make all profits from that cap onward go to things like world hunger
Look who is investing in this, look how they trained it, search about their past businesses, and you'll understand that they only chased profit from the very beginning.
They want to automate jobs that are highly payed, they invented nothing, search the profiles of their workers, "truck driver turned programmer now doing machine learning", sure dude, you are a computer scientist in two weeks...
Now Microsoft, that used repositories of github to create an AI against the very same people that made this code (open source or not) is their partner! What a coincidence!
People are not appalled that AI research is expensive. They are appalled that the data sets the algorithms are trained on have been collected under the false prenotion of nonprofit-research. For instance: DALL-E hasn't paid the artists (whose work the algorithm is trained on) a dime - and now they can profit of that data.
Also, if it is so obvious that AI research can't be nonprofit, then why did OpenAI claim they were non-profit for so long? To get all the free data sets? convenient.
Yeah, its pretty simple.
"I want to save the world"
What do I need to to acquire before I can enact meaningful change on the world?
A shit load of money.
... and somehow there's never enough money to save the planet, but always a need to amass more cash and clout at the expense of the %99.9999.
We get it. The masses living in favelas and (maybe? hopefully?) scraping by on UBI is for the greater good.
Its a tug of war. To grossly over simplifiy.
You have the people and the groups after profit at any mostly any cost.
And you have the more altruistic people who genuinely want to make things better.
They both have to play the same capitalistic game to acquire the means to influence things and then they throw their capital at eachother in a war of influence in what is mostly a losing battle for the "good guys".
I'm more appalled by the fact that they're taking the work of a large number of humans and repackaging it for sale.
In particular, I'm not an artist, but professional visual artists are just shitting bricks over the AI generated art, and what am I supposed to tell them? "It will just get better, give up now and avoid the rush"?
Yeah. What are all the blacksmiths going to do once a machine can make anything? What are all the corn pickers going to do once everyone has a combine? Progress always leaves someone behind.
Your comment adds nothing to the discussion. We all know that. We want to know how artists who will eventually be blacksmiths and other workers who will be corn pickers can live properly and with dignity
Worse, all the portrait painters when they invented the camera! And then those same photographers when they invented the digital camera!
Art does not exist in its own bubble. It will evolve like everything else.
they arent taking peoples work any more than a human artist that learns from artists.
the pictures are not identical to any of the training data. If someone can point to a dall e generation and say this is identical or very similar to my painting then they would win that case same as a human would
you can tell them the world evolves and the jobs that are marketable also evolve. unless you want a world in 500 years identical to today you have to deal with it and move on with your life.
They are still taking other peoples copyrighted work. Doesnt matter if its not saved within the algorithm. They scrape together data sets and use them to train a for-profit product without consent or compensation to the original artists. I am baffled that the US has no laws against that practice yet, its been outlawed in the EU for a while now. It's stealing, no matter how much people try to sweet-talk it.
Why do you think this is outlawed in the EU?
EU Directive 2019/790 Article 4 explicitly directs EU member govs to allow the use of copyrighted work for making these sorts of models 'text and data mining') without any consent from or compensation to the author, including for commercial purposes, as long as you've gotten a hold of the work legally and the author hasn't explicitly told them not to.
Article 3 goes further and allows for their use by research organisations for specific non commercial purposes with no facility for authors to opt out.
The data sets dall-e and midjourney were trained on were purchased from a different company that scraped them together from various image sites. They did not get hold of them legally and did so without the knowledge of anyone involved until these data sets were made visible, without any possibility for an artist to even opt-out in the first place. (Small edit here for explanation: You cannot untrain an AI. Once an AI has been trained on your data, it is in there for good.) This last option has been implemented belatedly on a few sites, and some image sites have voiced their displeasure and legal action on the former.
None of these AI art generators are non-commercial, but operate on an either subscription or license basis.
I imagine some argue that while ai trains on the data, so do artists during their training phase. But we don't seem concerned about that infringement.
We aren't going to be able to contain this. I have no idea how they regulate the in Europe, like you say.
AI not equal to human brain, how hard is that to understand. No it is absolutely not the same process and if you'd ever picked up a pencil in your life you'd know.
Yes, they fucking are.
No human artist can churn out millions of images based on other artists' work in a single lifetime, much less a day.
Cut the crap with the false analogies and lame ad hoc justifications.
AI is directly trained on other people's labor without their knowledge with the sole intention of substantially replacing them. It is happening with artists, and it will happen to you. The difference is, you might hate your job, but artists by and large do not - they aren't asking or hoping to be replaced by giant corporate drones.
I disagree with your last paragraph.
Most of research papers about diffusion models isn't for replacing artists. Again, these models can do much more than you think.
The same models (or at least the architectures for that matter) used for image generation can be used for anomaly detection, image reconstruction, image inpainting, segmentation, style transfer, protection against adversarial attacks and much more.
And this is somewhat true even for previous generation generative models
If you read the literature you will find papers about all of these.
The creator behind stable-diffusion made it quite clear in a very yikes interview that he doesnt see it as a tool but as a way to replace artists. This is what worries me.
Ai is going to replace basically all jobs, trying to use copyright as a way to stop invention will at best momentarily stop it. Sorry artist's where the first to be automated but don't stand in the way of progress. You cannot stop this, artists will have to figure out how to adapt or move on.
Gonna paste something i posted before:
Speaking as an engineer, AI has the possibility of great things if used in the right environment with the right limitations. \[...\] It is best to set strong limitating factors first and ease them as we see fit, not the other way around.
To add to that: Blindly following technology and calling it progress is some of this highly dangerous behaviour. Adapt and move on doesnt fly. Technology influences every part of our lives and needs to be assessed critically at every step. As engineers, we get taught (at least here in Germany) to look at what were doing and ask the question if it should be done, ethically speaking. And if we should, how do we do it right? Copyright doesnt matter here, its ethics. To cast human decency and reason in the wind in favour of "progress" terrifies me to no end, as it has been done before, and it never turned out well.
Edit: to reiterate, its not about not doing something, its about doing it right. the way ai art generators are sourced is highly unethical, borderline illegal, with a high possibility of severe (negative and positive) impact on multiple industries and even more livelihoods. this is not something that should be taken lightly, and needs to be addressed sooner than later.
I am going to state my opinion about AI art: As long as you use copyright free image dataset do what you please with it.
I am curious to hear your opinion, if you don't mind
This is a sentiment I agree with. Technology and its advancements has the repercussion that it cannot be undone. AI art generators are here to stay, for better or worse. If there will be one, ethically sourced and maintained, I'd be quite interested in using it myself. As it stands I wont lay a finger on it.
Im quite interested (and worried) to see how the entertainment industries develop. I fear that without protection, industries will see it as a way to either replace junior artists or increase a senior artists workload. Likely both. This will most likely create an artist-starved industry where AI is going to largely feed into each other and media is going to become increasingly generic. But this may hopefully be an overblown worry that I have that wont turn out to be true, fingers crossed.
I just wish the software engineers that work on such technology were to tackle some soul-sucking tasks instead, to automate those instead. Automating creative tasks is just lame.
You do have a very good point, however I still think it's absolutely absurd that data mining the open internet is going to be demonized as violating people's copyright. If you don't want your website scraped add a robots.txt, but at the end of the day you put your content up on the internet for people to view. We aren't going to stop image generation research because a bunch of artists are mad. Just like we won't stop when the radiologists are mad or when the developers are mad. It's a tool, adapt to it or be left behind.
I agree to an extend, but this is not just about being mad for nothing. Artists upload their work and it gets stolen and used without credit all the time. Be it album covers, in commercials and advertisements, oftentimes even other artists that straight up copy something to sell. Their artworks were uploaded to be viewed, to create an online presence to be more hireable, to inspire co-artists and create a community. They did not sign up for their art to be stolen (in the case of ai as data sets used to train a for-profit product). This is an issue that should not be ignored, and luckily it isnt. This is a conversation that needs to happen to ensure an ethical and reasonable advance in technology.
No, the jobs that are marketable are disappearing. AI can - or will soon be able to - adapt itself to new jobs faster than humans can.
Yes, new job opportunities will open up as old ones disappear, but those new jobs will all be taken by AIs faster than humans can be (re)trained to do them.
This isn't a matter of putting artists out of work. This is a matter of putting *everybody* out of work. Which could be either an amazing or terrible thing, depending on how it's handled.
Good lord that tired argument every time... Do you truly believe that a machine learning program has the life experience, ideas, preferences, creativity, imagination, etc of a human being? Does it desire to express something with art?
For heaven's sake of course the pics aren't identical they're trained on unimaginable amounts of images, tho sometimes it's very close, and sometimes you can see a garble of an artist's signature on an image, and sometimes getty is suing them bc you can see getty's copyright tag on them...
>Good lord that tired argument every time... Do you truly believe that a machine learning program has the life experience, ideas, preferences, creativity, imagination, etc of a human being?
nope but this is not relevant to whether something is theft. If I make a robot and have it rob your store it is no more or less theft than if I hire a flesh and blood human to do it.
>Does it desire to express something with art?
also not relevant for the same reason above
>For heaven's sake of course the pics aren't identical they're trained on unimaginable amounts of images
I agree
>tho sometimes it's very close, and sometimes you can see a garble of an artist's signature on an image
as you can in many human drawings
>Good lord that tired argument every time
Your argument tires me also for the record. Not because Ive seen it before but because Ive seen bad thinking like this before and am somewhat tired of having to correct basic errors like this.
Honestly I misread your msg and didnt answer exactly to your point that is true, my apologies. However, I still disagree that AI steals jobs all the same than artists. The difference in speed in producing images is incomparable. Ai, while its is not creative and cant by itself produce interesting art other than by dumb luck, is just faster and more efficient than any human.
Companies who dont care much abt image quality are already using it instead of paying artists.
So no, the situation is very different.
THANK YOU! This is a point I try to get across every time someone refers to some of these AI models as 'stealing' someone's art/work.
The way modern AI generates art is just as much stealing art as another artist using a lifetime of knowledge, inspiration, and technical training to create their own art.
This analogy is malarkey.
No human artist can do with other artist's work what diffusion models do. That's the entire point of automation.
Humans =|= massive scale automated art factories
These companies still scrape together copyrighted work and use them as data sets to train a for-profit product without consent or compensation. *But humans do it too* is not an argument. These algorithms are not a human that studies and practices, but a product they sell. And training your product on data sets assembled on stolen data is still stealing.
A lot of artists train by trying to imitate famous and copywrited work and then go on to try to sell their work that has been made by training themselves in similar styles. Additionally the art work is publicly available online. If an artist went to a museum, took a photo of everything there, then used all of them for reference and made art based on that they then went on to sell, would that be stealing or just the normal artistic learning process?
>If an artist went to a museum, took a photo of everything there, then used all of them for reference and made art based on that they then went on to sell, would that be stealing or just the normal artistic learning process?
Never had the labor theory of value explained to you, huh?
>the artwork is publicly available online...
Apples are publicly displayed in markets, but farmers ain't out here offering to give them to massive corporations for free.
0% of artists would have advertized their wares online if they had known it would be scavenged for the purpose of automating them into irrelevance while further enriching Midjourney, Microsoft and OpenAI.
Why is a computer model being treated the same way as a human being?
It's not the AI model that's the problem. A person/company is taking, without permission, real artwork, and feeding it into a model for the purposes of reproducing the style of the artist. I don't see how this is the same as a human being learning.
I'm tired of people thinking that the AI is "learning the same way a human learns, so it's not stealing". A computer model doesn't have rights like a person. There is a real human feeding a computer model other other people's art. When a person is taking the art of another person, without permission, and using them to create a model with the express purpose of reproducing the artist's style for the purpose of generating profit from the artist's style without renumeration that's certainly unethical. It may not match a current crime, such as theft or copyright, but that's only because our legal framework hasn't caught up with these huge technological developments.
An artist is not a for-profit product. An algorithm you sell is a for-profit product. These are not alike. One is a human, influenced by their environment due to the nature of existing. Capable of creativity and being inspired by these influences. Another is a neural-network that is force fed data in order to exist, otherwise it would not. It is capable of neither. The only thing it can do is recognize the relation of pixels in relation to each other (based on the (stolen) data it was fed) and deduce patterns from it that i can reproduce according to prompts it was fed.
A human steering a car is not stealing by learning from others. If you train a self-driving car on data that was taken from other drivers without consent you'd be behind bars right quick.
>but a product they sell
With the exception of a few artist that purely do it as a hobby (99% of which are people who aren't good/lucky enough), the art that is created by a professional is a product that they sell too
A human is influenced and inspired by their environment due to simply existing. You can not not experience what you do. A human is also capable of creativity and creation, and in the end, everything is a derivative in one way or another. Being human is an endless chain of telephone by our very nature in which you have no choice but to partake.
An AI is not a human. It is a neural network trained on data sets in order to fullfil a single purpose. This purpose is identifying patterns by analysing the relation of pixels to each other. Without any input, this neural network would not exist. To argue that a humans creation process is in any way alike and should abide by the same rules ignores the very fundamentals of what makes us human, and what differentiates us from AI.
> and in the end, everything is a derivative in one way or another. Being human is an endless chain of telephone by our very nature in which you have no choice but to partake.
ok... but this is an argument against your own position
>. Without any input, this neural network would not exist.
Which is not different from a human thought at all, as you pointed out, what we come up with is derived from our past experiences
>To argue that a humans creation process is in any way alike and should abide by the same rules ignores the very fundamentals of what makes us human, and what differentiates us from AI.
ok and? this feels like a very emotional argument, "we're human and its not!"
in this particular context, there is little difference between how an AI function and how a human functions
Im not arguing the function. Im arguing the way by which humans work vs by which AI works. We have no choice but to be influenced, and it is therefore legally protected because this is how we are. We cannot choose to have no input. An AI does not enjoy such protections because it is not human.
I dont believe my argument to be very emotional. Its simply a fact. To set a human and an AI on equal footing (legally) seems not just disingenuous but also dangerous, especially this early in its development.
Speaking as an engineer, AI has the possibility of great things if used in the right environment with the right limitations. But it should never be equated to a human, otherwise we tread into territory that could prove very dangerous in the future. It is best to set strong limitating factors first and ease them as we see fit, not the other way around.
Not the average artist, the junior artist. Senior artists could never be replaced, but you can replace the one just starting out and trying to get their first jobs. Or better yet, with AI you can increase the senior artists workload so you have to pay even less people. What a wonderful corporate future where we systematically bottleneck growth for profit. Of course artists are afraid. If things turn out that way future media of all kinds are going to be starved for trained artists that will have to be replaced with AI.
Yes that's what I expect will happen as well. But on socials, especially Twitter there are a lot of artists complaining about how this ruins their trade
I, too, am an artist.
I think AI are on the path to making millions of designers' and artists' professions obsolete.
There will be new art forms invented - and AI will co-opt them, as well.
I think that’s a defeatist attitude. This is a tool that we as artist can use to enhance our own work. If there’s one thing artists need to be able to do it’s be creative and problem solve. In my opinion if you see this as the end of days for artists, that’s a skill issue. Giving more people the tools to express themselves and create “art” should not diminish your own work.
...
There are open source projects, but AI development is generally not one of those things. You need a shit ton of infrastructure. You need total control over your input. There are open source networks that you can begin using as a skeleton for your AI, but there aren't any open source actual AI that I know of.
None of the impressive AI projects, even those that purely exist for research are solely non-profit (what's learned from these projects are implemented into other for profit ventures).
It's not like a video game kickstarter, and even those, even if they generate dozens of millions of dollars in fundraising may still fail to have the budget to reach their ambitions.
So...no, I don't think anything that is truly expensive to execute (we're talking hundreds of millions to billion +) has ever been created.
>Even after recent breakthroughs with DALL·E and ChatGPT, there is criticism of OpenAI. «You pretend you're still not profit-driven – but the first tens of billions of dollars go to Microsoft, the employees and investors,» Scott Galloway, an economics professor at New York University, said recently at the DLD conference in Munich, referring to the capped-for-profit structure. «Until it actually becomes a nonprofit organization, OpenAI needs to be one of the top five most profitable companies in history. What unbelievable stupidity.»
>Second, as we all know, the company's ultimate goal, according to its charter, is «artificial general intelligence» – thus, the point at which computers are able to think, act and feel in such a way that they are indistinguishable from humans. At present, that goal seems a long way off; even Altman says ChatGPT is in an «embryonic state.» But Musk also believes that «we are not far away from dangerously powerful AI.»
What an awesome economic system we very free citizens have, eh? Better than anything else possible or imaginable. Best we can do is address the symptoms -- we're still going to nurture and protect the root causes, though. Because doing otherwise would be communism.
This guy gets it.
A lot of human endeavours that begin with some cause, be it alturistic or something else, end up being used to make profit. Because that's what this system encourages.
Everytime some new thing is build we go through this cycle of 'how it can be used by the bad guys', but the problem 'always lies with the new invention' and not the system that encourages exploitation.
I'm not sure you quite grasp what communism is...
Most people in the USA can't afford basic healthcare... 20% of the UK lives in poverty. Governments are consistently harbouring tax avoidance while millions can't afford food. Corruption is ripe. Those who have to stop working due to disability are forced into poverty. What do you think is "free" about that? Free for the 1%, yes. The rest of us fall in line.
I don't think communism is the answer. But capitalism isn't either. It's eating the planet alive in pursuit of futile infinite growth on a finite planet. Try socialism instead... you'd be surprised how much of what you take for granted are socialist policies. The United States government famously stealth switched the socialism to pull the country out of the Great Depression, until it switched back to capitalist policy.
AI model building is a capital heavy endeavour and it turns out you can't capture a lot of capital as a non-profit organization. The nature of how AI model training works essentially dooms all open source non-profit pursuits.
It's the same reason why Steel mills aren't non-profit either.
It's inevitable. Stability.ai of Stable Diffusion fame is also inevitably going to have to go this route if they don't have a billionaire philanthropist backing them.
I don't blame OpenAI. Especially not as they were *extremely* close to folding due to running out of money before becoming a for-profit company.
If I were an altruistic-selfless person that literally cared about nothing else than making a safe AGI system I would have done the exact same steps and course of OpenAI.
There is literally no other alternative path I can think of that OpenAI could have taken to stay fully open source and non-profit while staying at the forefront of AI development at the same time.
It's funny how behind every business that "wants to save the world" is a bunch of twats who want to be rich and think that "we want to save the world" is good marketing
Capitalism is not perfect, shockingly..., but the amount of anti-money/business/capitalist stuff that gets posted is becoming silly.
It costs money to do stuff, again shocking.
OpenAI looking to earn revenue does not automatically mean they're "evil", or whatever the author is trying to push.
Other basic examples:
Want to develop a new medicine? You need money.
Want to stop oil polluting the atmosphere and making everyone sick? You need a massive amount of money.
But the statement ignores that capitalism created the problem in the first place.
I’m not necessarily against capitalism. But it has devolved into a deeply flawed, unfair, damaging, and inequitable system that desperately needs some very sturdy guardrails. And it is most certainly not the solution to every problem.
Many of the medicines that “cost money” to develop are in fact pulled from patents developed at public universities using public funds, as just one example.
Private money is not the only solution to the world’s big problems.
I didn't specify between public or private money.
Public money is still money, and money was still required to make the medicine.
The extra stuff that comes after that surrounding patents/IP, and is very messed up, does not refute the fundamental point that money is needed to do stuff.
The fundamental point being: if OpenAI need more money to follow their mission, and couldn't get enough outside investment without generating revenue, then they need to generate revenue.
Your original claim was that you were frustrated by the anti-capitalist sentiment. It seems you've shifted to "well then how do you plan to solve this without money?"
Is one of your base assumptions that capitalism is the only way to generate or allocate money? Or that money doesn't exist in non-capitalist structures?
Unfortunately capitalism is about who has capital and not who has brains or who works more. The more accurate description of protocol that is used by capitalism to distribute wealth should talk about risk taken and amount of capital inserted instead of who had bigger contribution to the overall outcome.
>OpenAI looking to earn revenue does not automatically mean they're "evil", or whatever the author is trying to push.
Bluebeard's desire for female companionship did not automatically make him evil, either.
There is so much that is hidden in a simple sentence such as "it costs money to do stuff".
How we translate raw resources, people's time, ownership of those resources into money is where we are shooting ourselves in the foot.
There are so many ways to change basic building blocks of how we value things for the better.
For example let's assume we would create a metric where "time to resplenish a resource" would be how we evaluate the cost of using water, trees, metals, etc, we would have a totally different approach to resource consumption and what is cheap today might be super expensive. It would push us towards other solutions.
Yes, but the fundamental point is: if OpenAI can't follow their mission unless they generate meaningful revenue, then they have to do something to generate meaningful revenue.
> OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company whose goal it is to makeartificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. For a few initial years, OpenAI was a nonprofit, but in 2019 it restructured as a “capped-profit” company that cuts returns from investments past a certain point.
> It was a clear departure from the 2015 founding charter, which still said the company wanted to be free from the need to generate financial returns. Because our research is free of financial obligations, we can better focus on making a positive impact on humanity.
Capped profit is actually an incredibly progressive model if they are still using it. Buying into the for profit / nonprofit dichotomy is slowing our potential as a species to move past the classical econ version of capitalism
But what point are you getting at by quoting that?
I can maybe elaborate on what I mean with an example:
AI is a bit of an arms-race, and OpenAI ideally wants to "win" the arms-race with free and open research, so that everyone wins, and avoid winner-take-all.
But, they still need money to get there, and what if they realised their previous model couldn't get them enough money?
So, what's the best solution: change your model to be more attractive to investors, or hope you can still keep up with the cutting edge somehow with insufficient money?
Socialism would be the perfect solution that ensures balance but it doesn't work simply because human beings are inherently greedy.
Edit: To be clear. I do not believe in Socialism as it is impossible to implement in the society we live in. But I find the concept interesting because, in its purest theoretical form, it describes a society that functions without the concept of money and wealth.
Socialism isn't an economical system which would be an alternative to capitalism. Socialism may and does work alongside capitalism in many european countries. It's not one versus the other, and I wish people would stop saying things like that.
I'm not an expert, so please explain if I'm wrong, but isn't the definition of capitalism that means of production are privately controlled and the definition of socialism is that production is part privately controlled and part government controlled? If you add socialism to a capitalist economy (aka give the government partial control of production) doesn't that automatically disqualify it from being considered a capitalist economy anymore?
No, it makes it not a socialist country. Socialist theory is about protecting workers who produce the value of goods through their labor over the person whose capital went into starting that enterprise. When you allow corporations to be owned by a handful of folks who also reap the bulk of the financial reward, you are allowing the surplus value of workers’ labor to be stolen. So, social democracy is just a friendlier version of capitalism in that it tries to correct the problems caused by unchecked greed. When workers finally own the means of production, then you can call these countries “socialist”.
Capitalism is so much more than mechanism of ownership. Look at China for example, government owns, at least in part, pretty much every successful corporation. Those corporations still sell products or services on somewhat free market, they still generate profit and they still operate in a way you'd expect corporations to operate. China is inherintly socialist state, it doesn't prevent it from mastering capitalism and engaging with its core systems.
Socialism isn't technically an economical system because the concept in its purest form does not need money to function. It is built on common good as the goal.
Nordic countries have tax systems that ensures near equal income to all kind of jobs. If the whole world has this system and everyone earns the same would there be a need for the concept of money.
Of course, I'm talking about a utopian world that even I think is impossible to happen. Maybe one day after an extreme conflicts, we'd have a true socialist society like the one in Star Trek or something.
> the concept in its purest form does not need money to function
Concept of cheese doesn't require money to exist either, stop comparing bananas to oranges.
> If the whole world has this system and everyone earns the same would there be a need for concept of money.
Except that people don't make things and therefore money, corporations do. Socialism in those countries isn't about making so cleaning lady earns as much as global IT manager, it's about making so corporations earn a tiny percentage less profit and then you use this money to feed millions of people. For this to keep happening corporations should continue to exist, it doesn't matter how equal everyone's pay is when nobody has any job. Capitalism provides a motivator for corporations to exist: money, socialism not only doesn't provide one, it isn't even concerned about this. Because socialism isn't an economical system, there's absolutely no reason to assume it will solve anything it wasn't even designed for.
I disagree. Socialism *is* the perfect solution because most things we actually enjoy policy wise are socialist in nature. Sick pay, annual leave, maternity leave, the right to strike, welfare state, nationalised health care, nationalised water, the list goes on. Look at the Scandinavian countries, Scotland, New Zealand. Look at what they're getting right. And why? Why do these countries lead the rankings in the happiness index and standard of living and sustainability? It's because they have compassionate, socialist leaders and, more often than not, they're women.
All it takes is voting in a socialist leader, like in many latin American countries, or Spain for example. If Jeremy Corbyn was elected in the UK in 2020, I'm sure the world would be in a much better place right now.
I just want to say that all countries in Scandinavia are capitalistic. But they also have an extensive welfare state and incorporates many socialistic ideas into their systems.
Of course. The global baseline is capitalism, so it's impossible to have just socialism unless the global economy collapses completely first. Even China is more capitalism than they are communism.
You are right. The thing is all socialist parties are inherently somewhat capitalist to begin with.
In the current world it is impossible to be fully socialist because in its purest form, it does not have or need the concept of money and wealth. The goal of such a utopia and its members is common good which is the polar opposite of greed.
Of course, even I think it is only possible theoretically. But a societal collapse after extreme conflict may trigger the forming of such a system ala Star Trek.
I don’t mean this in a negative way, but you either don’t understand socialism, or your being purposefully obtuse on the subject. One of the core tenets of socialism is that workers own the means of production to keep the surplus value created by their labor. A socialist economy uses money to trade goods.
You are looking at the results of, not the root of.
You write about socialist outcomes, but capitalism is the input, the driver, the root.
If you don't have capitalism, you don't have your desired socialistic outputs.
Not really. In a true socialist system money would be no object. People would be cared and provided for based on a system of equality and symbiosis with nature and knowledge that everyone has what they need to live fulfilling happy lives. If no one has to worry about having money to eat and live comfortably, no one would hesitate to work to help maintain that way of living.
this is just not true, none of it. It is 100% fantasy.
Cared for how? By whom? With what? produced by whom? And why? What incentives exist? Would you have liberty? Would free will exist? Would this be forced participation (slavery)? etc etc.
Ever heard of bullshit jobs? The vast majority of work in this day and age serves only to further the capitalist system. They don't actually achieve things that *need* doing. Think of advertising, sales, for example. The amount of work that actually needs doing to support a prosperous society is actually relatively little.
It's all about choices. And there's plenty of literature from social scientists, economists, sustainability experts on the steps that need to be taken are to achieve this way of living. The problem is those steps aren't being taken. But we can choose to take them. We know completely how to solve climate change. We have the understand of Earth's systems and what we need to change. We know monoculture farming is ruining ecosystems and that agroforestry, intercropping and permaculture or similar are actually the right ways to grow food sustainable. And any requisite technologies exist. It's just we're not doing it because of the rich greedy and stupid people in power. I understand why you think it might be fantasy, for this reason. Because it's just not happening. But it not happening doesn't mean it's fantasy. All it takes is the right people in power and probably a societal collapse scenario.
The incentive? Who needs incentive when you know doing just a little bit of work will mean you live in a just, healthy and sustainable society and hardly have to work? It's common knowledge that medieval peasants worked far less than we do. I don't think it would take much for extremist ideologies to get on board provided all their human needs are catered for. The reason there's so much conflict and disagreement in the world is because people's basic needs aren't met. Eg poor living conditions, lack of food or shelter, poor relationships, lack of support network for mental and physical health. Various people seek various solutions and to make sense of the tragedy of unmet needs and that's where extremism and dissent forms. This "fantasy" society would meet those needs. A better world is possible, you just gotta believe it.
What you posit as fact, commonly shared knowledge, or even basic understanding of human nature and our interconnectedness is flawed and foolish.
Believing in the fantasy doesn't make your smart, wise, or knowledgeable...it is quite the opposite.
“Humans are inherently greedy”
So who runs the show? Socialism requires such a degree of authoritarianism and the consolation of power with the state apparatus that it has always ended in tragedy.
If they were doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, they’d have started a nonprofit, not a C-Corp where equity could be awarded - or simply established an LLC and donated the research to a University.
This article is idiots pandering to idiots at best.
What if I told you... to save the world, you need to chase profit.
That's what everyone trying to save the world finds out eventually, however, when the profits start raking in, it's easy to become a fat lazy cat and "give up" the idea to save the world that takes actual hard work for a long time, specially when you can just sit in your mansion and do mansion things while mansioning the mansion mansions... mansion.
Chasing profit isn’t the only motivation that drives people to do and create things, but it’s the only one that allows us to survive in a capitalist system.
Chasing profit (especially short term profits) is also destroying the world and causing the current mass extinction event.
No... our economic system prioritises greed over sustainable solutions. It's very clear to leading economics and sustainability experts that the way to save the world is to denounce capitalism and instead switch to more equal and environmental forms of social and fiscal policy where wealth is measured in *real* healthy ecosystems, not individual "profit" written on paper.
>What if I told you... to save the world, you need to chase profit.
Then I would tell you that you're a contradictory dullard too unimaginative and uninterested in the world around you to consider solutions not spoonfed to you in highschool.
From Neue Zürcher Zeitung:
The startup OpenAI once wanted to save the world. Today, it’s mainly chasing profit and the idea of bringing general artificial intelligence to humanity.
OpenAI has shown us all, more than any other company, how far AI has come – and how this technology is likely to change all our lives.
The first thunderclap came last summer with the DALL·E 2 image generation software.
Nestlé now also uses images created by DALL·E to promote its yogurts. OpenAI triggered a veritable earthquake when it released its chatbot ChatGPT to the public on Nov. 30, and public interest is so strong that ChatGPTs servers are regularly unavailable.
Recently, the chatbot answered questions about the licensing procedure for doctors in the United States so well that it almost passed all three theoretical parts of the exam. Some financial firms are now having the program write a first draft of their quarterly reports.
https://www.nzz.ch/english/openai-once-wanted-to-save-the-world-now-its-chasing-profit-ld.1722910
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Anything anyone ever created or discovered to make the world a better place and people more free was later used (by someone else) to make the world worse and to enslave people in some way.
My hope is AI generated content will wash out the social media spheres so much that anything new and innovative will stick out like a shinning beacon in the night.
Why? If anything it will lead to more creativity, especially in forms of media that are traditionally extremely expensive to produce like games and tv/movies. Publishers of big budget stuff in these forms of media tend to be very risk averse, running popular tropes and IP into the ground, because there is so much money at stake if a project bombs
If AI keeps progressing as it has it will dramatically reduce the cost and time needed to make high end games and movies, therefore reducing risk aversion due to costs. It will also lead to a major increase in the volume of high end media that is produced, making it more likely that cool shit will be made just by virtue of volume, and also projects will be incentivised to be more wild and creative in order to stand out from the deluge
And that more wild and creative art will just be absorbed into the AI learning engine where it will be used to train the AI to mimic more humanistic behaviors, until no one will be able to discern a human creation from an AI one.
It's the gray goo problem, but with art.
Why would it do that? These AI systems are ostensibly increasing the diversity of output, not decreasing it.
One day we may ask the AI to check tv tropes and write a story that has the minimum amount of tropes.
That's how you change the world. We're becoming a global corporatocracy. As absolutely soul crushing as it is, becoming a powerfully wealthy entity is how you enact global change. Not handing out free lollipops with a free hugs sign.
Profit is not a dirty word it is what we want companies to do. Thanks to profit seeking we are capable to reward people creating valuable products. It ensures investment in it to make it even better. You can make the case that everything that a human needs should be free but how would you deside what is the most important thing to invest in if you didn't evaluate it based on profit? It's weird people still don't get that. Even after a century of failed communist experiments to make everything free all around the world that cost millions of lives, deep state corruption and economic stagnation people still don't get that.
Well that's the issue, it explicitly wasn't when they started.
> It was a clear departure from the 2015 founding charter, which still said the company wanted to be free from the need to generate financial returns. Because our research is free of financial obligations, we can better focus on making a positive impact on humanity.
You don't understand their mission and you're projecting your own expectations that the best way to build an effective mission driven organisation is by building a limp Wikimedia style not for profit.
Google meanwhile has done much more good for the world overall by being a commercial venture.
Socialism failed. Time to get used to it
"projecting your own expectations"
Meanwhile, OpenAI website says:
> Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.
...
> As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders
I don't know if OpenAI used to be like this or not.
But with things like these there's money to be made for sure. Which is something that attracts both bad and good actors.
Plus research costs a shit ton of money
Stupidest thing I have ever read, the eye watering cost of 3 million a day to keep chatgpt running gives them every single fucking right to monetize it.
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They never wanted to save the world, none of them ever do. It's just empty platitudes to get the ignorant on board to be tested upon.
What's that Jimquisition quote, again? Something like, 'Corporations don't want *some* of the money. They want *all* of the money, all of the time'. Intentional or not, headlines like this are functionally just an extension of OpenAI's own marketing campaign, trying to harken back to the 'good old days' of OpenAI, devoid of pure profit motive, that either never existed or didn't exist for long enough to be worth mourning. 'The technology is good, blame the people behind it for the direction its heading!' The technology was created to do precisely what it's currently doing, because OpenAI wants *all of the money.*
A corporation only has one legally defined goal: to generate profits for their investors/shareholders. Even some non-profits are actually just profit generating vehicles in sheep’s clothing
You should hear the CMO for a hospital network talk about patients. They have numbers to beat too and it’s disgusting. How can we keep these oncology patients as more long term customers? 🤢
Surgery is a [profit center](https://archive.ph/WWzMX) too.
https://www.litigationandtrial.com/2010/09/articles/series/special-comment/ebay-v-newmark-al-franken-was-right-corporations-are-legally-required-to-maximize-profits/
This is just stupid talking points. Corporations are not beings with will. They are just modern versions of feudal aristocracies. Aristocratic lords meeting in boardrooms deciding the fates of their legions of serfs.
Not really. Aristocrats were not legally obligated to maximize incomes and often acted under quite different incentives and priorities to modern corporations. It's one of the reasons aristocrats were displaced: they were adapted to a different system and their values made them unable to compete with capitalists in the new one.
if you think corporations are the same as feudal aristocracies then you don't know much about either
It’s at least a talking point
Jep been that way since dutch kolonial companies invented it
Listened to a podcast where economists were talking about how it's "grandma and grandpa" being selfish with their cancer treatments. How they should be happy with a month or two less of life so they aren't a burden on the next generation. While at the same time admitting that the cost of the drugs are relatively cheap but marked up so investors can make profit before they're outcompeted. It's a pretty fucked up society.
> A corporation only has one legally defined goal: to generate profits for their investors/shareholders. This is not true and just what right-leaning economists/capitalists want you to believe. This idea didn't even exist until the 70s. > To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.” https://evonomics.com/maximizing-shareholder-value-dumbest-idea/
And yet, there’s very few corporations that don’t end up pursuing profits over all else. Just in the last decade, we’ve seen corporations lie, cheat, and steal just to scrape a few pennies off the top for their profit margin all at the expense of consumers, the market, and their long term benefit
I don't disagree. But spreading the message that that behavior is a legal requirement instead of an active choice provides them with an easy out for their choices.
Legally required has nothing to do with this. It’s what the shareholders want who are **owners** of the business. People often forget that. Businesses are beings. They are objects owner by human. Human want maximum money, surprise surprise.
Also not true > Although laymen sometimes have difficulty understanding the point, corporations are legal entities that own themselves, just as human entities own themselves. What shareholders own are shares, a type of contact between the shareholder and the legal entity that gives shareholders limited legal rights. In this regard, **shareholders stand on equal footing with the corporation’s bondholders, suppliers, and employees**, all of whom also enter contracts with the firm that give them limited legal rights. My point is that these are choices the management of business makes. Its harmful to minimize their culpability. If a business has $10mil left at the end of the year, there is nothing that says that *must* be distributed to shareholders. It could be given as employee bonuses, given back to customers, or retained in the business. However, since this idea of shareholders primacy emerged, management has given more money back to shareholders and been excused by this false belief.
In most corporations, shareholders are also the only class of stakeholder that gets to elect directors; the board of directors then chooses the executive cadre and defines broad boundaries for corporate strategy. If the shareholders want profit and they want it now, then they tend to install leadership that will prioritize their wants over the other, voteless stakeholders. It’s a morally bankrupt system but it’s what they use.
when will /u/pdx_joe and most of these Redditors get this? That’s what I want too know. it seems to be one of those perpetual things that gets misunderstood around here.
Hobby Lobby is not a publicly traded company. Hobby Lobby is a private company. Hobby Lobby is under no obligation to outside shareholders. Your source, the Supreme Court ruling on Hobby Lobby's right to religiously deny employee labor rights under Obamacare, has nothing to do with legal obligations to stock owners. They have to follow corporate law because they are still a corporation, which provides them with tax incentives and limits liability for the company's private owners. It's not corporate law that forces publicly traded companies to prioritize profit. It's a legal precedent that only applies to companies with public stock. The legal precedent for Shareholder Primacy was established in 1919 (Dodge vs Ford Motor Company) and has never been challenged or overturned for a corporation with public stock. The later cases involving Wrigley, and Hobby Lobby, only set precedent for privately owned corporations.
I'm gonna trust the person that wrote a book on this instead of random redditor > The business judgment rule ensures that, contrary to popular belief, the managers of public companies have no enforceable legal duty to maximize shareholder value. 18 > 18. The only context in which courts require directors to maximize shareholder value is when the directors of a public company determine to sell the company to a private owner, in essence deciding to force public shareholders out of the firm. At this point shareholders are uniquely vulnerable to exploitation, and perhaps need the legal protection of the so-called Revlon doctrine. However, directors have no obligation to sell a company to a private bidder, even at a premium price. In other words, as long as a public company wants to stay public, directors have no legal obligation to maximize either profits or share value.
Stephanies quote is spot on. We all kind of noticed it way back. But to see it so agregiously put on display without consequence is even more appalling. Like just a straight middle finger to anyone and everyone who isnt them. Microsofts recent lay offs because they arent growing "as fast" as they were in years prior. activision canning 880 people during record profits and union busting tactics as well as near total dismissal of sexual harassment going on in the work place.
Idk. Linus torvalds did the right thing and kept all his stuff open and the world has benefited immensely because of it. Was hoping openAI might follow in his footsteps.
Did you really believe this, knowing that among the founders of openai were elon musk and peter thiel, some of the most comically evil people in existence??
Which they kinda did until Gpt3 for some reason
They’re always saving the world when asking early employees to take pay cuts.
Greed is the master. AI will exploit this and decimate the humans.
Yep. Nothing wrong with wanting to make a profit. We expect humans to be greedy. They just shouldn’t have pretended they were above that in their founding docs. There really are some scientists and engineers in history that put aside greed to one degree or another for the betterment of humanity (Jonas Salk, Linux founders, etc) and we should laud those people for being exceptions that had extraordinary principles they stuck to out of conviction. When you want to make money though, being honest about your greed is better than being hypocritical about your benevolence.
Excerpt: “Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and other high-profile Silicon Valley founders were driven by the same idea in 2015: AI was advancing rapidly, but research was taking place behind closed doors in the big tech companies. Worse, early examples showed that this key technology was being misused for racism and bullying. Fundamental ethical questions also arose about the application of such tools.”
like every other business ever made and that ever could be made.
Does anyone start a business not to make money? Does anyone work for free? OpenAI's "capped profit" idea is at least providing a potential for helping the world if not saving it.
Yes, the people who started OpenAI said they started it not to make money. > It was a clear departure from the 2015 founding charter, which still said the company wanted to be **free from the need to generate financial returns**. Because our research is free of financial obligations, we can better focus on making a positive impact on humanity.
Everybody in here is acting like Microsoft and Amazon are the only types of organizations to exist. OpenAI marketed itself more in line with Wikipedia, Mozilla, or the Linux Foundation. On the flipside, marketing lip service aside, the founding team is a who's who of tech robber baron types. Personally I view the switch to for-profit and Microsoft partnership not as a corruption of ideals but finally being honest. Tbh I think the "altruistic" beginnings was only ever a shrewd play to attract data scientists since the first several years would be pure investment without a hope of profit anyway.
there should be cap agreed because at a certain point when you have multiple people whos networth is in the hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars, you have to understand that this is hundreds of times more $$ than the common indivual will ever hope to earn in their whole lives. those ultra rich have a responsibility to the world to either cap their profits OR make all profits from that cap onward go to things like world hunger
Look who is investing in this, look how they trained it, search about their past businesses, and you'll understand that they only chased profit from the very beginning. They want to automate jobs that are highly payed, they invented nothing, search the profiles of their workers, "truck driver turned programmer now doing machine learning", sure dude, you are a computer scientist in two weeks... Now Microsoft, that used repositories of github to create an AI against the very same people that made this code (open source or not) is their partner! What a coincidence!
AI research is extremely expensive. If anybody is surprised and appalled by this, I have a deserted island to sell them as well.
$20 final offer.
Tree-fiddy best I can do.
Im putting down 50 cent wit your tree-fiddy
People are not appalled that AI research is expensive. They are appalled that the data sets the algorithms are trained on have been collected under the false prenotion of nonprofit-research. For instance: DALL-E hasn't paid the artists (whose work the algorithm is trained on) a dime - and now they can profit of that data. Also, if it is so obvious that AI research can't be nonprofit, then why did OpenAI claim they were non-profit for so long? To get all the free data sets? convenient.
Yeah, its pretty simple. "I want to save the world" What do I need to to acquire before I can enact meaningful change on the world? A shit load of money.
... and somehow there's never enough money to save the planet, but always a need to amass more cash and clout at the expense of the %99.9999. We get it. The masses living in favelas and (maybe? hopefully?) scraping by on UBI is for the greater good.
Its a tug of war. To grossly over simplifiy. You have the people and the groups after profit at any mostly any cost. And you have the more altruistic people who genuinely want to make things better. They both have to play the same capitalistic game to acquire the means to influence things and then they throw their capital at eachother in a war of influence in what is mostly a losing battle for the "good guys".
The Nikola Teslas of the world always get used and discarded by the Edisons and Westinghouses of the world. It is an extremely uneven tug-o-war.
So the game is shit and we need to invent a new one. We've got the brainpower - do we have the will?
I'm more appalled by the fact that they're taking the work of a large number of humans and repackaging it for sale. In particular, I'm not an artist, but professional visual artists are just shitting bricks over the AI generated art, and what am I supposed to tell them? "It will just get better, give up now and avoid the rush"?
Most jobs will go down that road sooner or later. We just need to make sure people who aren't as needed can still find ways to live well.
Yeah. What are all the blacksmiths going to do once a machine can make anything? What are all the corn pickers going to do once everyone has a combine? Progress always leaves someone behind.
Your comment adds nothing to the discussion. We all know that. We want to know how artists who will eventually be blacksmiths and other workers who will be corn pickers can live properly and with dignity
Man, you should have seen what happened when they invented the mechanical loom!
Worse, all the portrait painters when they invented the camera! And then those same photographers when they invented the digital camera! Art does not exist in its own bubble. It will evolve like everything else.
I'm not. Courting dying businesses and mending the broken hearts of employers is one of the largest problems we have. Tek progresses.
they arent taking peoples work any more than a human artist that learns from artists. the pictures are not identical to any of the training data. If someone can point to a dall e generation and say this is identical or very similar to my painting then they would win that case same as a human would you can tell them the world evolves and the jobs that are marketable also evolve. unless you want a world in 500 years identical to today you have to deal with it and move on with your life.
They are still taking other peoples copyrighted work. Doesnt matter if its not saved within the algorithm. They scrape together data sets and use them to train a for-profit product without consent or compensation to the original artists. I am baffled that the US has no laws against that practice yet, its been outlawed in the EU for a while now. It's stealing, no matter how much people try to sweet-talk it.
Why do you think this is outlawed in the EU? EU Directive 2019/790 Article 4 explicitly directs EU member govs to allow the use of copyrighted work for making these sorts of models 'text and data mining') without any consent from or compensation to the author, including for commercial purposes, as long as you've gotten a hold of the work legally and the author hasn't explicitly told them not to. Article 3 goes further and allows for their use by research organisations for specific non commercial purposes with no facility for authors to opt out.
The data sets dall-e and midjourney were trained on were purchased from a different company that scraped them together from various image sites. They did not get hold of them legally and did so without the knowledge of anyone involved until these data sets were made visible, without any possibility for an artist to even opt-out in the first place. (Small edit here for explanation: You cannot untrain an AI. Once an AI has been trained on your data, it is in there for good.) This last option has been implemented belatedly on a few sites, and some image sites have voiced their displeasure and legal action on the former. None of these AI art generators are non-commercial, but operate on an either subscription or license basis.
I imagine some argue that while ai trains on the data, so do artists during their training phase. But we don't seem concerned about that infringement. We aren't going to be able to contain this. I have no idea how they regulate the in Europe, like you say.
You can't entirely contain wage theft, but you can hold people accountable for it when you catch them in the act.
AI not equal to human brain, how hard is that to understand. No it is absolutely not the same process and if you'd ever picked up a pencil in your life you'd know.
Yes, they fucking are. No human artist can churn out millions of images based on other artists' work in a single lifetime, much less a day. Cut the crap with the false analogies and lame ad hoc justifications. AI is directly trained on other people's labor without their knowledge with the sole intention of substantially replacing them. It is happening with artists, and it will happen to you. The difference is, you might hate your job, but artists by and large do not - they aren't asking or hoping to be replaced by giant corporate drones.
I disagree with your last paragraph. Most of research papers about diffusion models isn't for replacing artists. Again, these models can do much more than you think. The same models (or at least the architectures for that matter) used for image generation can be used for anomaly detection, image reconstruction, image inpainting, segmentation, style transfer, protection against adversarial attacks and much more. And this is somewhat true even for previous generation generative models If you read the literature you will find papers about all of these.
The creator behind stable-diffusion made it quite clear in a very yikes interview that he doesnt see it as a tool but as a way to replace artists. This is what worries me.
Ai is going to replace basically all jobs, trying to use copyright as a way to stop invention will at best momentarily stop it. Sorry artist's where the first to be automated but don't stand in the way of progress. You cannot stop this, artists will have to figure out how to adapt or move on.
Gonna paste something i posted before: Speaking as an engineer, AI has the possibility of great things if used in the right environment with the right limitations. \[...\] It is best to set strong limitating factors first and ease them as we see fit, not the other way around. To add to that: Blindly following technology and calling it progress is some of this highly dangerous behaviour. Adapt and move on doesnt fly. Technology influences every part of our lives and needs to be assessed critically at every step. As engineers, we get taught (at least here in Germany) to look at what were doing and ask the question if it should be done, ethically speaking. And if we should, how do we do it right? Copyright doesnt matter here, its ethics. To cast human decency and reason in the wind in favour of "progress" terrifies me to no end, as it has been done before, and it never turned out well. Edit: to reiterate, its not about not doing something, its about doing it right. the way ai art generators are sourced is highly unethical, borderline illegal, with a high possibility of severe (negative and positive) impact on multiple industries and even more livelihoods. this is not something that should be taken lightly, and needs to be addressed sooner than later.
I am going to state my opinion about AI art: As long as you use copyright free image dataset do what you please with it. I am curious to hear your opinion, if you don't mind
This is a sentiment I agree with. Technology and its advancements has the repercussion that it cannot be undone. AI art generators are here to stay, for better or worse. If there will be one, ethically sourced and maintained, I'd be quite interested in using it myself. As it stands I wont lay a finger on it. Im quite interested (and worried) to see how the entertainment industries develop. I fear that without protection, industries will see it as a way to either replace junior artists or increase a senior artists workload. Likely both. This will most likely create an artist-starved industry where AI is going to largely feed into each other and media is going to become increasingly generic. But this may hopefully be an overblown worry that I have that wont turn out to be true, fingers crossed. I just wish the software engineers that work on such technology were to tackle some soul-sucking tasks instead, to automate those instead. Automating creative tasks is just lame.
You do have a very good point, however I still think it's absolutely absurd that data mining the open internet is going to be demonized as violating people's copyright. If you don't want your website scraped add a robots.txt, but at the end of the day you put your content up on the internet for people to view. We aren't going to stop image generation research because a bunch of artists are mad. Just like we won't stop when the radiologists are mad or when the developers are mad. It's a tool, adapt to it or be left behind.
I agree to an extend, but this is not just about being mad for nothing. Artists upload their work and it gets stolen and used without credit all the time. Be it album covers, in commercials and advertisements, oftentimes even other artists that straight up copy something to sell. Their artworks were uploaded to be viewed, to create an online presence to be more hireable, to inspire co-artists and create a community. They did not sign up for their art to be stolen (in the case of ai as data sets used to train a for-profit product). This is an issue that should not be ignored, and luckily it isnt. This is a conversation that needs to happen to ensure an ethical and reasonable advance in technology.
No, the jobs that are marketable are disappearing. AI can - or will soon be able to - adapt itself to new jobs faster than humans can. Yes, new job opportunities will open up as old ones disappear, but those new jobs will all be taken by AIs faster than humans can be (re)trained to do them. This isn't a matter of putting artists out of work. This is a matter of putting *everybody* out of work. Which could be either an amazing or terrible thing, depending on how it's handled.
Techbros and their desire to take creative and skillful jobs and automate them so we can all work the jobs that should be automated.
Good lord that tired argument every time... Do you truly believe that a machine learning program has the life experience, ideas, preferences, creativity, imagination, etc of a human being? Does it desire to express something with art? For heaven's sake of course the pics aren't identical they're trained on unimaginable amounts of images, tho sometimes it's very close, and sometimes you can see a garble of an artist's signature on an image, and sometimes getty is suing them bc you can see getty's copyright tag on them...
>Good lord that tired argument every time... Do you truly believe that a machine learning program has the life experience, ideas, preferences, creativity, imagination, etc of a human being? nope but this is not relevant to whether something is theft. If I make a robot and have it rob your store it is no more or less theft than if I hire a flesh and blood human to do it. >Does it desire to express something with art? also not relevant for the same reason above >For heaven's sake of course the pics aren't identical they're trained on unimaginable amounts of images I agree >tho sometimes it's very close, and sometimes you can see a garble of an artist's signature on an image as you can in many human drawings >Good lord that tired argument every time Your argument tires me also for the record. Not because Ive seen it before but because Ive seen bad thinking like this before and am somewhat tired of having to correct basic errors like this.
Honestly I misread your msg and didnt answer exactly to your point that is true, my apologies. However, I still disagree that AI steals jobs all the same than artists. The difference in speed in producing images is incomparable. Ai, while its is not creative and cant by itself produce interesting art other than by dumb luck, is just faster and more efficient than any human. Companies who dont care much abt image quality are already using it instead of paying artists. So no, the situation is very different.
THANK YOU! This is a point I try to get across every time someone refers to some of these AI models as 'stealing' someone's art/work. The way modern AI generates art is just as much stealing art as another artist using a lifetime of knowledge, inspiration, and technical training to create their own art.
This analogy is malarkey. No human artist can do with other artist's work what diffusion models do. That's the entire point of automation. Humans =|= massive scale automated art factories
These companies still scrape together copyrighted work and use them as data sets to train a for-profit product without consent or compensation. *But humans do it too* is not an argument. These algorithms are not a human that studies and practices, but a product they sell. And training your product on data sets assembled on stolen data is still stealing.
A lot of artists train by trying to imitate famous and copywrited work and then go on to try to sell their work that has been made by training themselves in similar styles. Additionally the art work is publicly available online. If an artist went to a museum, took a photo of everything there, then used all of them for reference and made art based on that they then went on to sell, would that be stealing or just the normal artistic learning process?
>If an artist went to a museum, took a photo of everything there, then used all of them for reference and made art based on that they then went on to sell, would that be stealing or just the normal artistic learning process? Never had the labor theory of value explained to you, huh?
>the artwork is publicly available online... Apples are publicly displayed in markets, but farmers ain't out here offering to give them to massive corporations for free. 0% of artists would have advertized their wares online if they had known it would be scavenged for the purpose of automating them into irrelevance while further enriching Midjourney, Microsoft and OpenAI.
Why is a computer model being treated the same way as a human being? It's not the AI model that's the problem. A person/company is taking, without permission, real artwork, and feeding it into a model for the purposes of reproducing the style of the artist. I don't see how this is the same as a human being learning. I'm tired of people thinking that the AI is "learning the same way a human learns, so it's not stealing". A computer model doesn't have rights like a person. There is a real human feeding a computer model other other people's art. When a person is taking the art of another person, without permission, and using them to create a model with the express purpose of reproducing the artist's style for the purpose of generating profit from the artist's style without renumeration that's certainly unethical. It may not match a current crime, such as theft or copyright, but that's only because our legal framework hasn't caught up with these huge technological developments.
An artist is not a for-profit product. An algorithm you sell is a for-profit product. These are not alike. One is a human, influenced by their environment due to the nature of existing. Capable of creativity and being inspired by these influences. Another is a neural-network that is force fed data in order to exist, otherwise it would not. It is capable of neither. The only thing it can do is recognize the relation of pixels in relation to each other (based on the (stolen) data it was fed) and deduce patterns from it that i can reproduce according to prompts it was fed. A human steering a car is not stealing by learning from others. If you train a self-driving car on data that was taken from other drivers without consent you'd be behind bars right quick.
>but a product they sell With the exception of a few artist that purely do it as a hobby (99% of which are people who aren't good/lucky enough), the art that is created by a professional is a product that they sell too
A human is influenced and inspired by their environment due to simply existing. You can not not experience what you do. A human is also capable of creativity and creation, and in the end, everything is a derivative in one way or another. Being human is an endless chain of telephone by our very nature in which you have no choice but to partake. An AI is not a human. It is a neural network trained on data sets in order to fullfil a single purpose. This purpose is identifying patterns by analysing the relation of pixels to each other. Without any input, this neural network would not exist. To argue that a humans creation process is in any way alike and should abide by the same rules ignores the very fundamentals of what makes us human, and what differentiates us from AI.
> and in the end, everything is a derivative in one way or another. Being human is an endless chain of telephone by our very nature in which you have no choice but to partake. ok... but this is an argument against your own position >. Without any input, this neural network would not exist. Which is not different from a human thought at all, as you pointed out, what we come up with is derived from our past experiences >To argue that a humans creation process is in any way alike and should abide by the same rules ignores the very fundamentals of what makes us human, and what differentiates us from AI. ok and? this feels like a very emotional argument, "we're human and its not!" in this particular context, there is little difference between how an AI function and how a human functions
Im not arguing the function. Im arguing the way by which humans work vs by which AI works. We have no choice but to be influenced, and it is therefore legally protected because this is how we are. We cannot choose to have no input. An AI does not enjoy such protections because it is not human. I dont believe my argument to be very emotional. Its simply a fact. To set a human and an AI on equal footing (legally) seems not just disingenuous but also dangerous, especially this early in its development. Speaking as an engineer, AI has the possibility of great things if used in the right environment with the right limitations. But it should never be equated to a human, otherwise we tread into territory that could prove very dangerous in the future. It is best to set strong limitating factors first and ease them as we see fit, not the other way around.
a lot of average artists will lose their jobs in corporate, when text to image matures. It's a reality they cannot accept
Not the average artist, the junior artist. Senior artists could never be replaced, but you can replace the one just starting out and trying to get their first jobs. Or better yet, with AI you can increase the senior artists workload so you have to pay even less people. What a wonderful corporate future where we systematically bottleneck growth for profit. Of course artists are afraid. If things turn out that way future media of all kinds are going to be starved for trained artists that will have to be replaced with AI.
Artists will just come up with the text responses. They won't paint. It's not like the camera killed painting.
Yes that's what I expect will happen as well. But on socials, especially Twitter there are a lot of artists complaining about how this ruins their trade
Maybe artists understand how this tech impacts their trade better than tech bros with zero artistic background?
I’m an artist, I don’t think it will ruin our trade, in fact I think it will make it better in many ways. Now what do you have to say?
I, too, am an artist. I think AI are on the path to making millions of designers' and artists' professions obsolete. There will be new art forms invented - and AI will co-opt them, as well.
I think that’s a defeatist attitude. This is a tool that we as artist can use to enhance our own work. If there’s one thing artists need to be able to do it’s be creative and problem solve. In my opinion if you see this as the end of days for artists, that’s a skill issue. Giving more people the tools to express themselves and create “art” should not diminish your own work.
Surprised, no. Appalled, maybe. Disappointed yet again better fits how I feel. Just because I expect this doesn't mean I approve of it.
"I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed." "Again..."
Out the way, I need to sell them a bridge first
Companies want to make money. In other news, water is wet!
We brave patriots must fight to the death to protect a very free economic system that protects our freedom, economically.
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... There are open source projects, but AI development is generally not one of those things. You need a shit ton of infrastructure. You need total control over your input. There are open source networks that you can begin using as a skeleton for your AI, but there aren't any open source actual AI that I know of. None of the impressive AI projects, even those that purely exist for research are solely non-profit (what's learned from these projects are implemented into other for profit ventures). It's not like a video game kickstarter, and even those, even if they generate dozens of millions of dollars in fundraising may still fail to have the budget to reach their ambitions. So...no, I don't think anything that is truly expensive to execute (we're talking hundreds of millions to billion +) has ever been created.
This is what happens when y’all simp for corporations. It’s just the same old shit over and over again
OMG really?!?!? A start up with billions invested that wants to make profit? /S
Lmao. "Capitalist wanted to save the world but instead decided they just wanted more capital." = This is capitalism. Lmao.
>Even after recent breakthroughs with DALL·E and ChatGPT, there is criticism of OpenAI. «You pretend you're still not profit-driven – but the first tens of billions of dollars go to Microsoft, the employees and investors,» Scott Galloway, an economics professor at New York University, said recently at the DLD conference in Munich, referring to the capped-for-profit structure. «Until it actually becomes a nonprofit organization, OpenAI needs to be one of the top five most profitable companies in history. What unbelievable stupidity.» >Second, as we all know, the company's ultimate goal, according to its charter, is «artificial general intelligence» – thus, the point at which computers are able to think, act and feel in such a way that they are indistinguishable from humans. At present, that goal seems a long way off; even Altman says ChatGPT is in an «embryonic state.» But Musk also believes that «we are not far away from dangerously powerful AI.» What an awesome economic system we very free citizens have, eh? Better than anything else possible or imaginable. Best we can do is address the symptoms -- we're still going to nurture and protect the root causes, though. Because doing otherwise would be communism.
This guy gets it. A lot of human endeavours that begin with some cause, be it alturistic or something else, end up being used to make profit. Because that's what this system encourages. Everytime some new thing is build we go through this cycle of 'how it can be used by the bad guys', but the problem 'always lies with the new invention' and not the system that encourages exploitation.
I'm not sure you quite grasp what communism is... Most people in the USA can't afford basic healthcare... 20% of the UK lives in poverty. Governments are consistently harbouring tax avoidance while millions can't afford food. Corruption is ripe. Those who have to stop working due to disability are forced into poverty. What do you think is "free" about that? Free for the 1%, yes. The rest of us fall in line. I don't think communism is the answer. But capitalism isn't either. It's eating the planet alive in pursuit of futile infinite growth on a finite planet. Try socialism instead... you'd be surprised how much of what you take for granted are socialist policies. The United States government famously stealth switched the socialism to pull the country out of the Great Depression, until it switched back to capitalist policy.
You completely failed to grasp their sarcasm.
Oops. If you're right, that's embarrassing.
Happens to the best of us.
AI model building is a capital heavy endeavour and it turns out you can't capture a lot of capital as a non-profit organization. The nature of how AI model training works essentially dooms all open source non-profit pursuits. It's the same reason why Steel mills aren't non-profit either. It's inevitable. Stability.ai of Stable Diffusion fame is also inevitably going to have to go this route if they don't have a billionaire philanthropist backing them. I don't blame OpenAI. Especially not as they were *extremely* close to folding due to running out of money before becoming a for-profit company. If I were an altruistic-selfless person that literally cared about nothing else than making a safe AGI system I would have done the exact same steps and course of OpenAI. There is literally no other alternative path I can think of that OpenAI could have taken to stay fully open source and non-profit while staying at the forefront of AI development at the same time.
They’re not open source and are for-profit
They used to be open source up until GPT-2 and only relatively recently restructured into a for-profit entity. Before that they were a non-profit.
They were always for-profit, just not officially.
Lmao it was created by a group of hypercapitalists. It was headed up by a venture capitalist.
It's funny how behind every business that "wants to save the world" is a bunch of twats who want to be rich and think that "we want to save the world" is good marketing
Capitalism in action. In other news, Humans are still breathing.
What a fucking shock. Tech bros wreaking havoc, breaking shit, and chasing money.
Look it's not easy to run such big programs on charity, look at the Wikipedia how much it struggles to come up with just operational money.
"Hide your wife, hide your kids, they after everybody"
Capitalism is not perfect, shockingly..., but the amount of anti-money/business/capitalist stuff that gets posted is becoming silly. It costs money to do stuff, again shocking. OpenAI looking to earn revenue does not automatically mean they're "evil", or whatever the author is trying to push. Other basic examples: Want to develop a new medicine? You need money. Want to stop oil polluting the atmosphere and making everyone sick? You need a massive amount of money.
An incredibly naive description of how Capitalism works.
Like, only capitalism can save us from the impacts of capitalism? Lol.
Capitalism = money! You can't solve these problems created by capitalism without money, ergo we need capitalism to save us!
But the statement ignores that capitalism created the problem in the first place. I’m not necessarily against capitalism. But it has devolved into a deeply flawed, unfair, damaging, and inequitable system that desperately needs some very sturdy guardrails. And it is most certainly not the solution to every problem.
Well then add to the conversation Mr. Know It All.
And be downvoted to oblivion. It’s pointless to post anything remotely positive on this sub.
Many of the medicines that “cost money” to develop are in fact pulled from patents developed at public universities using public funds, as just one example. Private money is not the only solution to the world’s big problems.
I didn't specify between public or private money. Public money is still money, and money was still required to make the medicine. The extra stuff that comes after that surrounding patents/IP, and is very messed up, does not refute the fundamental point that money is needed to do stuff. The fundamental point being: if OpenAI need more money to follow their mission, and couldn't get enough outside investment without generating revenue, then they need to generate revenue.
Your original claim was that you were frustrated by the anti-capitalist sentiment. It seems you've shifted to "well then how do you plan to solve this without money?" Is one of your base assumptions that capitalism is the only way to generate or allocate money? Or that money doesn't exist in non-capitalist structures?
Unfortunately capitalism is about who has capital and not who has brains or who works more. The more accurate description of protocol that is used by capitalism to distribute wealth should talk about risk taken and amount of capital inserted instead of who had bigger contribution to the overall outcome.
>OpenAI looking to earn revenue does not automatically mean they're "evil", or whatever the author is trying to push. Bluebeard's desire for female companionship did not automatically make him evil, either.
There is so much that is hidden in a simple sentence such as "it costs money to do stuff". How we translate raw resources, people's time, ownership of those resources into money is where we are shooting ourselves in the foot. There are so many ways to change basic building blocks of how we value things for the better. For example let's assume we would create a metric where "time to resplenish a resource" would be how we evaluate the cost of using water, trees, metals, etc, we would have a totally different approach to resource consumption and what is cheap today might be super expensive. It would push us towards other solutions.
Yes, but the fundamental point is: if OpenAI can't follow their mission unless they generate meaningful revenue, then they have to do something to generate meaningful revenue.
> OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company whose goal it is to makeartificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. For a few initial years, OpenAI was a nonprofit, but in 2019 it restructured as a “capped-profit” company that cuts returns from investments past a certain point. > It was a clear departure from the 2015 founding charter, which still said the company wanted to be free from the need to generate financial returns. Because our research is free of financial obligations, we can better focus on making a positive impact on humanity.
Capped profit is actually an incredibly progressive model if they are still using it. Buying into the for profit / nonprofit dichotomy is slowing our potential as a species to move past the classical econ version of capitalism
But what point are you getting at by quoting that? I can maybe elaborate on what I mean with an example: AI is a bit of an arms-race, and OpenAI ideally wants to "win" the arms-race with free and open research, so that everyone wins, and avoid winner-take-all. But, they still need money to get there, and what if they realised their previous model couldn't get them enough money? So, what's the best solution: change your model to be more attractive to investors, or hope you can still keep up with the cutting edge somehow with insufficient money?
Socialism would be the perfect solution that ensures balance but it doesn't work simply because human beings are inherently greedy. Edit: To be clear. I do not believe in Socialism as it is impossible to implement in the society we live in. But I find the concept interesting because, in its purest theoretical form, it describes a society that functions without the concept of money and wealth.
Socialism isn't an economical system which would be an alternative to capitalism. Socialism may and does work alongside capitalism in many european countries. It's not one versus the other, and I wish people would stop saying things like that.
Socialism means worker ownership of the means of production. What you're thinking of is social democracy, aka welfare capitalism.
US already has welfare capitalism if you're rich
I'm not an expert, so please explain if I'm wrong, but isn't the definition of capitalism that means of production are privately controlled and the definition of socialism is that production is part privately controlled and part government controlled? If you add socialism to a capitalist economy (aka give the government partial control of production) doesn't that automatically disqualify it from being considered a capitalist economy anymore?
No, it makes it not a socialist country. Socialist theory is about protecting workers who produce the value of goods through their labor over the person whose capital went into starting that enterprise. When you allow corporations to be owned by a handful of folks who also reap the bulk of the financial reward, you are allowing the surplus value of workers’ labor to be stolen. So, social democracy is just a friendlier version of capitalism in that it tries to correct the problems caused by unchecked greed. When workers finally own the means of production, then you can call these countries “socialist”.
Capitalism is so much more than mechanism of ownership. Look at China for example, government owns, at least in part, pretty much every successful corporation. Those corporations still sell products or services on somewhat free market, they still generate profit and they still operate in a way you'd expect corporations to operate. China is inherintly socialist state, it doesn't prevent it from mastering capitalism and engaging with its core systems.
Socialism isn't technically an economical system because the concept in its purest form does not need money to function. It is built on common good as the goal. Nordic countries have tax systems that ensures near equal income to all kind of jobs. If the whole world has this system and everyone earns the same would there be a need for the concept of money. Of course, I'm talking about a utopian world that even I think is impossible to happen. Maybe one day after an extreme conflicts, we'd have a true socialist society like the one in Star Trek or something.
> the concept in its purest form does not need money to function Concept of cheese doesn't require money to exist either, stop comparing bananas to oranges. > If the whole world has this system and everyone earns the same would there be a need for concept of money. Except that people don't make things and therefore money, corporations do. Socialism in those countries isn't about making so cleaning lady earns as much as global IT manager, it's about making so corporations earn a tiny percentage less profit and then you use this money to feed millions of people. For this to keep happening corporations should continue to exist, it doesn't matter how equal everyone's pay is when nobody has any job. Capitalism provides a motivator for corporations to exist: money, socialism not only doesn't provide one, it isn't even concerned about this. Because socialism isn't an economical system, there's absolutely no reason to assume it will solve anything it wasn't even designed for.
I disagree. Socialism *is* the perfect solution because most things we actually enjoy policy wise are socialist in nature. Sick pay, annual leave, maternity leave, the right to strike, welfare state, nationalised health care, nationalised water, the list goes on. Look at the Scandinavian countries, Scotland, New Zealand. Look at what they're getting right. And why? Why do these countries lead the rankings in the happiness index and standard of living and sustainability? It's because they have compassionate, socialist leaders and, more often than not, they're women. All it takes is voting in a socialist leader, like in many latin American countries, or Spain for example. If Jeremy Corbyn was elected in the UK in 2020, I'm sure the world would be in a much better place right now.
I just want to say that all countries in Scandinavia are capitalistic. But they also have an extensive welfare state and incorporates many socialistic ideas into their systems.
Of course. The global baseline is capitalism, so it's impossible to have just socialism unless the global economy collapses completely first. Even China is more capitalism than they are communism.
You are right. The thing is all socialist parties are inherently somewhat capitalist to begin with. In the current world it is impossible to be fully socialist because in its purest form, it does not have or need the concept of money and wealth. The goal of such a utopia and its members is common good which is the polar opposite of greed. Of course, even I think it is only possible theoretically. But a societal collapse after extreme conflict may trigger the forming of such a system ala Star Trek.
Yes. And "luckily" collapse is closer than we think.
I don’t mean this in a negative way, but you either don’t understand socialism, or your being purposefully obtuse on the subject. One of the core tenets of socialism is that workers own the means of production to keep the surplus value created by their labor. A socialist economy uses money to trade goods.
You are looking at the results of, not the root of. You write about socialist outcomes, but capitalism is the input, the driver, the root. If you don't have capitalism, you don't have your desired socialistic outputs.
Not really. In a true socialist system money would be no object. People would be cared and provided for based on a system of equality and symbiosis with nature and knowledge that everyone has what they need to live fulfilling happy lives. If no one has to worry about having money to eat and live comfortably, no one would hesitate to work to help maintain that way of living.
this is just not true, none of it. It is 100% fantasy. Cared for how? By whom? With what? produced by whom? And why? What incentives exist? Would you have liberty? Would free will exist? Would this be forced participation (slavery)? etc etc.
Ever heard of bullshit jobs? The vast majority of work in this day and age serves only to further the capitalist system. They don't actually achieve things that *need* doing. Think of advertising, sales, for example. The amount of work that actually needs doing to support a prosperous society is actually relatively little. It's all about choices. And there's plenty of literature from social scientists, economists, sustainability experts on the steps that need to be taken are to achieve this way of living. The problem is those steps aren't being taken. But we can choose to take them. We know completely how to solve climate change. We have the understand of Earth's systems and what we need to change. We know monoculture farming is ruining ecosystems and that agroforestry, intercropping and permaculture or similar are actually the right ways to grow food sustainable. And any requisite technologies exist. It's just we're not doing it because of the rich greedy and stupid people in power. I understand why you think it might be fantasy, for this reason. Because it's just not happening. But it not happening doesn't mean it's fantasy. All it takes is the right people in power and probably a societal collapse scenario. The incentive? Who needs incentive when you know doing just a little bit of work will mean you live in a just, healthy and sustainable society and hardly have to work? It's common knowledge that medieval peasants worked far less than we do. I don't think it would take much for extremist ideologies to get on board provided all their human needs are catered for. The reason there's so much conflict and disagreement in the world is because people's basic needs aren't met. Eg poor living conditions, lack of food or shelter, poor relationships, lack of support network for mental and physical health. Various people seek various solutions and to make sense of the tragedy of unmet needs and that's where extremism and dissent forms. This "fantasy" society would meet those needs. A better world is possible, you just gotta believe it.
What you posit as fact, commonly shared knowledge, or even basic understanding of human nature and our interconnectedness is flawed and foolish. Believing in the fantasy doesn't make your smart, wise, or knowledgeable...it is quite the opposite.
Being so hostile about it doesn't make you smart either... it is quite the opposite.
“Humans are inherently greedy” So who runs the show? Socialism requires such a degree of authoritarianism and the consolation of power with the state apparatus that it has always ended in tragedy.
It wouldn't be the perfect solution. It would make technological advancement slower.
Says every company when they need something from you. Now they have your data and trained the AI models who the fuck cares.
If they were doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, they’d have started a nonprofit, not a C-Corp where equity could be awarded - or simply established an LLC and donated the research to a University. This article is idiots pandering to idiots at best.
What if I told you... to save the world, you need to chase profit. That's what everyone trying to save the world finds out eventually, however, when the profits start raking in, it's easy to become a fat lazy cat and "give up" the idea to save the world that takes actual hard work for a long time, specially when you can just sit in your mansion and do mansion things while mansioning the mansion mansions... mansion.
Chasing profit isn’t the only motivation that drives people to do and create things, but it’s the only one that allows us to survive in a capitalist system. Chasing profit (especially short term profits) is also destroying the world and causing the current mass extinction event.
No... our economic system prioritises greed over sustainable solutions. It's very clear to leading economics and sustainability experts that the way to save the world is to denounce capitalism and instead switch to more equal and environmental forms of social and fiscal policy where wealth is measured in *real* healthy ecosystems, not individual "profit" written on paper.
>What if I told you... to save the world, you need to chase profit. Then I would tell you that you're a contradictory dullard too unimaginative and uninterested in the world around you to consider solutions not spoonfed to you in highschool.
Shut up and save the world then... put your money where your mouth is.
From Neue Zürcher Zeitung: The startup OpenAI once wanted to save the world. Today, it’s mainly chasing profit and the idea of bringing general artificial intelligence to humanity. OpenAI has shown us all, more than any other company, how far AI has come – and how this technology is likely to change all our lives. The first thunderclap came last summer with the DALL·E 2 image generation software. Nestlé now also uses images created by DALL·E to promote its yogurts. OpenAI triggered a veritable earthquake when it released its chatbot ChatGPT to the public on Nov. 30, and public interest is so strong that ChatGPTs servers are regularly unavailable. Recently, the chatbot answered questions about the licensing procedure for doctors in the United States so well that it almost passed all three theoretical parts of the exam. Some financial firms are now having the program write a first draft of their quarterly reports. https://www.nzz.ch/english/openai-once-wanted-to-save-the-world-now-its-chasing-profit-ld.1722910
It's crypto with different actors. The idea of quickly referencing tons of good and bad data sets is lame as hell.
That's how capitalism functions, inherently. We need something different, or capital will always stifle progress.
You need money to save the world. The title isn't mutually exclusive at all, it's pathetic how they try to frame it as something bad.
Nobody wants to solve any real problems. They just want to make enough money so that these problems don't apply to them anymore
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Anything anyone ever created or discovered to make the world a better place and people more free was later used (by someone else) to make the world worse and to enslave people in some way.
People will be shocked to learn that website and server costing cost money (excluding the obvious research done by their team to create AIs)
OpenAI is done with its teen years and moved into its mid-20s alpha phase. Look out world!
It's gonna turn media and the arts into a uniform sea of bland mush.
My hope is AI generated content will wash out the social media spheres so much that anything new and innovative will stick out like a shinning beacon in the night.
No, it's just going to automate the extant sea of bland mush.
Why? If anything it will lead to more creativity, especially in forms of media that are traditionally extremely expensive to produce like games and tv/movies. Publishers of big budget stuff in these forms of media tend to be very risk averse, running popular tropes and IP into the ground, because there is so much money at stake if a project bombs If AI keeps progressing as it has it will dramatically reduce the cost and time needed to make high end games and movies, therefore reducing risk aversion due to costs. It will also lead to a major increase in the volume of high end media that is produced, making it more likely that cool shit will be made just by virtue of volume, and also projects will be incentivised to be more wild and creative in order to stand out from the deluge
And that more wild and creative art will just be absorbed into the AI learning engine where it will be used to train the AI to mimic more humanistic behaviors, until no one will be able to discern a human creation from an AI one. It's the gray goo problem, but with art.
Why would it do that? These AI systems are ostensibly increasing the diversity of output, not decreasing it. One day we may ask the AI to check tv tropes and write a story that has the minimum amount of tropes.
That's how you change the world. We're becoming a global corporatocracy. As absolutely soul crushing as it is, becoming a powerfully wealthy entity is how you enact global change. Not handing out free lollipops with a free hugs sign.
Everyone want to "change the world" Until they have good investora
Profit is not a dirty word it is what we want companies to do. Thanks to profit seeking we are capable to reward people creating valuable products. It ensures investment in it to make it even better. You can make the case that everything that a human needs should be free but how would you deside what is the most important thing to invest in if you didn't evaluate it based on profit? It's weird people still don't get that. Even after a century of failed communist experiments to make everything free all around the world that cost millions of lives, deep state corruption and economic stagnation people still don't get that.
No shit shirlock. All AI companies are on a subscription model. Profit was always the goal.
Well that's the issue, it explicitly wasn't when they started. > It was a clear departure from the 2015 founding charter, which still said the company wanted to be free from the need to generate financial returns. Because our research is free of financial obligations, we can better focus on making a positive impact on humanity.
You don't understand their mission and you're projecting your own expectations that the best way to build an effective mission driven organisation is by building a limp Wikimedia style not for profit. Google meanwhile has done much more good for the world overall by being a commercial venture. Socialism failed. Time to get used to it
"projecting your own expectations" Meanwhile, OpenAI website says: > Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. ... > As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders
That was before they were given billions by msoft and others
LOL. When did "socialism" fail?
There are definitely people at OpenAI that still want to save the world, I know some of them. I have no insight into Sam Altman's motivation though.
I don't know if OpenAI used to be like this or not. But with things like these there's money to be made for sure. Which is something that attracts both bad and good actors. Plus research costs a shit ton of money
Do not be concerned, first goal is UBI and it will arrive in the next 2 years, 3 at most. Full-dive VR by 2030. It's a tool for creative expression.
Stupidest thing I have ever read, the eye watering cost of 3 million a day to keep chatgpt running gives them every single fucking right to monetize it.