An unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model
Is AI the problem here, or is this story a symptom of a bigger problem?<p>This is a somewhat long comment, but just thought I would share my thoughts.<p>The concern is that someone who has worked hard to create art wants use it to leverage it to obtain security in their life, and they are at risk of losing that leverage with new AI technology. Well, first of all, plenty of people work hard their whole lives for low compensation because their skills are not unique, and often don&#x27;t have the time&#x2F;capital&#x2F;energy to build new skills even if they wanted to.<p>I question the way we live our life, there is a lot of suffering in the world because we are focused on taking from each other (in some cases using violence, in other cases laws). In the first world most people are expected to spend their childhood preparing to work away their adult life to earn minimum compensation  enriching someone else, and in the third word most people are in extreme poverty, which the first world is happy to exploit for labor, resource extraction, brain drain, strategic military advantage, ect.<p>Artificial intelligence is about to make a lot of things that required difficult and unique training trivial. Making many more people redundant, and no longer unique&#x2F;needed even if we do end up creating copyright laws enforcing that nobody can use someone&#x27;s work to train the AI. Do we really think that we won&#x27;t become redundant just because it doesn&#x27;t train on our art&#x2F;code? So like the artist here, we should all be wondering what is to come.<p>I think reason people are so worried is because we have it in our heads the way to conduct trade, and ourselves is by extracting value from one another. Instead of a culture of giving gifts without guarantee of reward, fostering relationships and caring for and understanding each other, we are trying to take from each other to ensure our needs&#x2F;wants are met. The ultimate way to achieve security under this way of life is to create a dependence, become the owner of the assets&#x2F;capital that can be used to take value&#x2F;labor from others want&#x2F;depend on what we have.<p>We act like we have only a few choices when it comes to how to live, religion, capitalism, communism, socialism, and so on. But we have the choice to try and understand the people we meet in life, and reach out to those who we don&#x27;t know. Knowing each others needs&#x2F;wants we can help each other out. We have the ability to be generous when we can, foster relationships, so that in our time of need we might be helped, by someone that cares (because we&#x27;re there for them too). It&#x27;s just that we listen to the advertisements telling us if we want to be happy, to buy more and more things (possibly at determent of our own health&#x2F;well being), we listen to leaders that would have us go to war with each other, we listen to society telling us to focus on making more money, exchange labor for wealth, and use the wealth to obtain security&#x2F;happiness.<p>What if instead we believed the most important thing was to live with balance with each other and with nature, and to communicate with each other to see how we can help. We do after all live in this world together, and when there is an imbalance we see the effects like poverty, stress&#x2F;anxiety, addiction, theft, violence, wars, exploitation, hate, not to mention the obscene amount of time we spend working (40+hr&#x2F;wk for 40+ years) to enrich someone that doesn&#x27;t care about us.<p>Are we not living in a backwards way? Most people are dependent on a few, by culture, or by force (think of how this force is created - if you don&#x27;t obey those with power&#x2F;authority, someone else who does will threaten you with violence or revoke privileges). If someone breaks a law, or threatens our livelihood, we&#x27;ll just take away their livelihood (or what little they had to begin with) - how well has this worked out?<p>With the advanced technology to communicate more easily than ever before, and provide what we need&#x2F;want with much less labor&#x2F;skill as before, and the wealth of knowledge available, it&#x27;s time realize, that by giving to each other and helping one another, we will all be better off. Well, maybe not the extremely wealthy and powerful powerful people - but even they don&#x27;t get to live in peace because someone is always trying to take their spot - think about all the wars fought because one authority is threatened by another, or all the companies trying to hold their grip in the face of more desperate innovate companies.<p>I&#x27;m not saying doing something different is easy, or straightforward, but it might be better. I think we don&#x27;t need to ask anyone&#x27;s permission to do it, we just start doing it within our own networks - building up each other, making new relationships, looking out for one another.<p>If you want your security to come from laws and by taking instead of giving, how long that will last, just how secure is that anyways?