You could’ve said the same about governments, cameras, GPS, internet, cookies, cellphones… Now AI.
I think people being lazy and giving away their rights and liberties is the issue, not the technology.
Every big tech is disruptive, people make choices.
We collectively choose to let « artistic expression » be more important than privacy, now anyone can take a picture of you, diffuse it virally on the internet and even sell it, if the picture of you was taken in public.
I think this is a dumb choice, I don’t agree with it but people choose to accept to live in a world like that…
That is just an example.
I feel the problem is people are generally uneducated and lazy most of the time.
Organized power like governments or private companies are not.
Efficient private companies are specially fast at reorganizing themselves and thinking of new strategies to make profit out of the lazy and dumb mass of people that we are.
They kinda define and push for a certain legal environment for these new techs to evolve within.
If a decision is made, people protest a bit in the beginning but most of the time give up and accept « the new norm ».
Individuals rarely take the tribunal way cause of lack of money and time it takes, it’s hard to compete legally with giants like Google for example.
Before, people had to buy music. If someone wanted a bootleg, it was most of the time not as good quality as the original. People had to listen to radio and hear ads and ear other artist before hearing their songs. Artists had to be « discovered » or work very hard to make it.
But at least artists were making money selling records locally.
The mass of music consumers might complain a bit it wasn’t perfect but in general people were happy and enjoyed music.
Then Napster came out and suddenly average joe has limitless instant access to any music produced in the world for free.
Of course a bunch of average Joe’s started to really enjoy that new tech and private companies saw the opportunity.
Only few people paid their MP3’s or bought original CD’s, they stole it from artists for a while. Artists were in fury, some losing a big chunk of their past revenues.
Some laws were slowly made to punish people from stealing music but application was and still is very lazy.
Instead of stronger regulation, companies like Spotify found a way to give lazy people what they want and found a way to make artists give up their rights and get a small fraction of their profits to get heard and « distributed ».
This can be undone but once people are used to a lifestyle and are addict to their dose dopamine, in this case easy and cheap access music, it is very hard to go back.
Uber was also a case of the same phenomenon.
It was morally and economically bad but lazy users loved it. Who cares if they don’t pay taxes, if they provide their service at loss to destroy competition ( and rais their prices once they destroyed it ) and if it’s less regulated, people love it!
Governments tried to hear taxi drivers and fight for them but the mass of people, the lazy one, loves it! That same mass also vote for those same governments… They better listen I guess, if they want to keep their job.
So now generative AI.
The same thing, lazy people loves to generate art, it’s fun, easy, it works well, it’s the future!
Again, big private companies already define the legal aspect in courts with big bucks to prepare the terrain for their future market.
Artists and philosophers raise the redflag.
I don’t remember average Joe’s complaining about the lack of generative imagery before and graphic artists were doing just fine.
But now average joe’s tasted generative AI and now they are addict to their new toy and they want to jeep it and they are gonna fight for it.
It’s ok if the mass collectively choose the lazy way, the « progress », again.
Too bad for hard workers, for the traditional way of doing things for centuries, they are annoying anyway and when you think about it, a computer storing a copy of an image in it’s memory is the same as a human having a blurry memory of it right?
That’s a convenient argument and it’s as simple as that right?
Well, the further we go this way the lazier we will get.
Hopefully there will always be curious humans inspired by hardworking and understanding the importance of doing things themselves but as a social specie, we tend to mimic the mass to feel accepted.
The more we go the lazy way the lazier we will get.
