Apple is reportedly planning to launch AI-powered glasses, a pendant, and AirPods

[highplainsdem]

44. Liberals are supposed to be good people, concerned about others and wanting fairness. That's all I'm

doing in opposing the nightmare of exploitation and unfairness that is the generative AI industry.

I don't know how much mockery/sarcasm you might've meant with that "you are a great person" line. I don't want flattery. I'm just trying to explain how much harm genAI does.

I think the legal and ethical questions around training data are complicated and still being worked out in courts and legislatures. Reasonable liberals can disagree on whether training on publicly available data constitutes theft in the way you describe. That debate is ongoing, and I support clearer rules, compensation models, and guardrails.

Actually, no, reasonable liberals can't disagree on whether training of genAI was and is theft. Publicly available is not the same thing as public domain, and never has been. Pretending they are is an automatic victory for the AI companies - which themselves are outraged and demand justice if they believe their intellectual property rights are being infringed upon.

And as a liberal, you should be well aware that both courts and legislatures can make unethical decisions favoring the wealthy and powerful. Which is what any decision attempting to legitimize theft would be. That's also part of why the AI companies have cozied up to Trump, tried to buy politicians, and are adding to war chests to try to ensure that politicians who want to regulate AI are defeated.

But I don’t accept the leap from “this technology has serious unresolved ethical issues” to “anyone who uses it is morally equivalent to someone who would support slavery or authoritarianism.” That’s a bridge too far for me. It turns a policy disagreement into a character indictment.

It is a question of moral choices. Everyone who knows of the worldwide and continuing IP theft that is the only reason genAI tools work at all well, and of all the other harm done by genAI, and still uses it voluntarily, has made a decision that they consider all those harms less important than what they believe they gain from its use.

And by not opposing genAI now, you're normalizing it, increasing the power of the AI companies, and making it less likely any of the harm that's being done will ever be stopped.

Your wearing and using AI glasses is advertising for the AI companies.

Those companies offer many AI tools for free or at very low prices not because they're so stupid they don't know the freebies are costing them money, or because they're donating use of those tools as philanthropy, but to both hook consumers on them and turn everyone using their AI into ads for AI.

I’m not trying to replace human creativity or help oligarchs crush culture. I still value human art, human writing, and human relationships. Using AI for other purposes doesn’t negate that.

You may not be trying to cause that harm, but you're enabling it.

A lot of AI users fall into the "dislike it in lots of ways but love it for this use" category.

That's semi-ethical, carving out an exception when it's useful for you.

It isn't an uncommon human trait. It's why the US had founders who could write about liberty and inalienable rights and still own slaves. The more people around them who owned slaves, the more comfortable they'd be with that hypocrisy. They'd also find ways to rationalize being very unethical in that one facet of their lives. And hey, the courts and legislatures told them it was fine...