His argument was literally that
- artists, writers, and programmers are “labor aristocracy” and deserve no respect because they’re sitting around making art and writing code while other people are toiling and laboring,
- genAI is a “free resource” (“it’s free for me to use at work”) that “helps everyone make things” instead of having to rely on skill and expertise and therefore makes everything equal,
- it’s hypocritical of people to be worried about the environmental and societal impact of genAI because “only white people are worried about it now that their hobbies are being threatened and everyone else is catching up”.
Pointing out there there are artists and programmers from every race and economic class, as well as perfectly ordinary people in every walk of life who are all actively being harmed both by the theft of ideas and labor and by the physical effects of gigantic data centers ruining communities, was met with much hand-waving and incredibly impenetrable philosophical jargon.
I’m particularly incensed because I’m as leftist and anticapitalist as they come and this felt like the fuckery some conservative cockwomble would try to come up with to parody socialism, except this guy was completely serious.
Anti ai being psyop and people using it to push agendas are not mutually exclusive
People are being paid large amounts of money to build these datasets, and the builders are incentivised for the training set to emulate real data, our OP is a clean example of this
For your point on my relativity comment, Llms are just as capable at producing referenced text as a human. And if the knowledge representation is air tight then hallucination is detectable. Eg llms solved fermats last theorem solved in lean.
Idk how ai winter fits here, did you check out the METR long horizon benchmark I mentioned. The bottleneck now is finding tasks it can’t solve.
If you build a ladder to the stars, you don’t have to achieve that goal to land on the moon.
Imagine yourself in 2020…what tasks would you have said was unachievable by a computer in that time? How many of those tasks are trivial in 2026? Fermats last theorem? proof against np hardness of 3 sat?
Anyway guess my point is, don’t kid yourself, these things are powerful, ignoring them and pretending their capabilities haven’t grown since 2022 is naive. And if we let oligarchs run this shit then the next century is gonna be fucking grim. Knowledge is power…arm up