Fuck AI

Chattel slavery is the worst evil on a very, very long scale of evils inflicted on working people. It is so evil it stands apart. But it doesn't make all the other labor abuses unimportant.

The plantation owners buy chattel slaves if you let them. You take them away and they import indentured labour. Take that away and they want convicts. Or illegal immigrants who can't go to the authorities. Non-union labor. Wage theft. Casual workers on commission. Self employed contractors with no labor rights. Unpaid interns.

Stealing every word written, every note played, every picture painted by every human to exist shouldn't be a surprise. The fact that this was done in lawful democratic societies under our noses is crazy. It should be causing an outrage. People are becoming worryingly disconnected and distracted.

The worst thing I think is that for so long we were told that working people could escape poverty and gain some control of their lives through education. Not much you could do for yourself working in a mine or factory but if your kids focus at school they can go to college and get a career. Don't have to struggle like their parents. Buy a nice house. Raise a family. And the rug has been pulled out. The house isn't happening. The family is on hold. Nobody is worried that AI has copied fine arts and literature from dead people. The problem is the impact on the living. It is another betrayal.

More impactful and incalculably more evil for sure but I actually don't know if in terms of number of human lifetimes stolen it would be larger. Probably if we count secondary effects caused by the slave trade and ongoing marginalisation though (like if your life falls apart because you got attacked by slavers then the labour you would have done for yourself/your community is stolen in a sense).

Kinda silly and bizarre maths to do anyway. Chattel slavery vvv bad, slavery in general v bad, Looting and enclosing commons also bad. Rich people exploiting others is bad and they should be punished for doing what they knew was wrong.

What? Ideas absolutely can be property. Hence copyright and patents.

I'm pretty sure if I wrote a book called the "Adventures of Harry Potter," I would get sued immediately.

If what you actually mean is that ideas can't be copyrighted, then yes, you are right.

Content, or simply works, is different: in most jurisdictions, whenever you create anything, you own its copyright whether you like it or not. In Europe, IIRC, there is not even a way of waiving that right.

The point here is that AS crawlers not only use but also reproduce information (sometimes verbatim) they don't own the copyright for and is therefore not theirs to publish. As anyone who went to the university knows, presenting the work of others as yours is the one thing you're not allowed to do.