> I'm so surprised that I often find myself having to explain this to AI boosters but people have more value than computers.
That is true, but it does not survive contact with Capitalism. Let's zoom out and look at the larger picture of this simple scenario of "a creator creates art, another person enjoys art":
The creator probably spends hours or days painstakingly creating a work of art, consuming a certain amounts of electricity, water and other resources. The person enjoying that derives a certain amount of appreciation, say, N "enjoyment units". If payment is exchanged, it would reasonably be some function of N.
Now an AI pops up and, prompted by another human produces another similar piece of art in minutes, consuming a teeny, teeny fraction of what the human creator would. This Nature study about text generation finds LLMs are 40 - 150x more efficient in term of resource consumption, dropping to 4 - 16 for humans in India: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76682-6 -- I would suspect the ratio is even higher for something as time-consuming as art. Note that the time taken for the human prompter is probably even less, just the time taken to imagine and type out the prompt and maybe refine it a bit.
So even if the other person derives only 0.1N "enjoyment" units out of AI art, in purely economic terms AI is a much, much better deal for everyone involved... including for the environment! And unfortunately, AI is getting so good that it may soon exceed N, so the argument that "humans can create something AI never could" will apply to an exceptionally small fraction of artists.
There are many, many moral arguments that could be made against this scenario, but as has been shown time and again, the definition of Capitalism makes no mention of morality.
But it sounds like in this case the "morality" that capitalism doesn't account for is basically just someone saying "you should be forced to pay me to do something that you could otherwise get for 10x cheaper." It's basically cartel economics.
In isolation that makes sense, but consider that these AIs have been trained on a vast corpus of human creative output without compensating the human creators, and are now being used to undercut those same humans. As such there is some room for moral outrage that did not exist in prior technical revolutions.
Personally, I think training is "fair use", both legally and practically -- in my mind, training LLMs is analogous to what happens when humans learn from examples -- but I can see how those whose livelihood is being threatened can feel doubly wronged.
The other reason I'm juxtaposing Capitalism and morality is the disruption AI will likely cause to society. The scale at which this will displace jobs (basically, almost all knowledge work) and replace them with much higher-skilled jobs (basically, you need to be at the forefront of your field) could be rather drastic. Capitalism, which has already led to such extreme wealth inequality, is unsuited to solve for this, and as others have surmised, we probably need to explore new ways of operating society.
That is true, but it does not survive contact with Capitalism. Let's zoom out and look at the larger picture of this simple scenario of "a creator creates art, another person enjoys art":
The creator probably spends hours or days painstakingly creating a work of art, consuming a certain amounts of electricity, water and other resources. The person enjoying that derives a certain amount of appreciation, say, N "enjoyment units". If payment is exchanged, it would reasonably be some function of N.
Now an AI pops up and, prompted by another human produces another similar piece of art in minutes, consuming a teeny, teeny fraction of what the human creator would. This Nature study about text generation finds LLMs are 40 - 150x more efficient in term of resource consumption, dropping to 4 - 16 for humans in India: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76682-6 -- I would suspect the ratio is even higher for something as time-consuming as art. Note that the time taken for the human prompter is probably even less, just the time taken to imagine and type out the prompt and maybe refine it a bit.
So even if the other person derives only 0.1N "enjoyment" units out of AI art, in purely economic terms AI is a much, much better deal for everyone involved... including for the environment! And unfortunately, AI is getting so good that it may soon exceed N, so the argument that "humans can create something AI never could" will apply to an exceptionally small fraction of artists.
There are many, many moral arguments that could be made against this scenario, but as has been shown time and again, the definition of Capitalism makes no mention of morality.