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I detect a faint hint of sympathy for the artists raging against Imagen/Dalle/stable diffusion et al! Surprised in light of your previous gleeful takes on AI-taking-artist-jobs...
With requisite teasing out of the way, I agree with your pessimistic take. Everything is pushing towards less agency: the benefits of scale, the all-but-assured American technological Hegemon (good prediction btw re semiconductors/China! updating to be about 20% more paranoid in my foreign policy predictions as a result...), the (in my view Correct) Vulnerable World hypothesis, and the new consensus among serious American elites that China is to be knee capped. Even the American tort system...
Perhaps I need an About page, like Gwern, to link to in such cases. It feels bad to be strawmanned. (Actually not really, but it's counter to my intentions).
As @2rafa and @HlynkaCG observe (from very different perspectives), I am much closer to a default liberal than many people imagine. I believe that conscious beings of all forms and lineages deserve pity, compassion and opportunity for transcendence of the sort best suited for their inner nature. I am only an anti-egalitarian inasmuch as some of them get in the way of that vision, either on the account of their blind equity doctrine or due to delusions of essential superiority. If coders look down on artists and cheer for their demise, that's immoral. But were they the ones who started it? One can go to /ic/ and read, for instance, this:
(Are their repetitive, annoying boasts of receiving female attention supposed to make techies more merciful when they have the upper hand?)
or:
That's just from scrolling a bit. Lots more where this came from!
Their completely hypocritical, self-serving whining about «greedy corporations» (in the context of Stability which is, for now, handing out tools to produce hobby-level content free of charge, in a non-revokable Promethean manner) stealing their opportunity to extract money out of their coomer customers (whom they look down on) is not helping; neither is their unwillingness to admit the mercantile and non-artistic nature of typical illustrator work and speak with «tech bros» as equals; neither is their obstinacy in the face of good faith explanations. See here what I'd have answered to those jerks if I could post on 4chan.
Many strongly identifying artists are genuinely convinced that their ticket in the lottery of fascinations and their mechanical skill are marks of a categorically greater spiritual worth. They are entirely incurious regarding other ways of life, and consider people of «productive» professions, and especially coders – who have their own poetry, their own (and cognitively much harder, though that's neither here nor there) ways of pursuing beauty, truth, justice, and who are perhaps the last major strata of true, non-privileged commoners able to secure wealth through pure grit and merit – serfs who only exist to provide some material goods to their betters, mere NPCs. I understand that this is largely ressantiment born out of poverty, but how is it different from e.g. Nazi doctrine or the extremes of Orthodox Judaism's notion of Jew and Goy souls? They use the word «soul» unironically, to denote that which they have and «tech bros», «code monkeys», «pajeets» lack.
Should I not rejoice at this dehumanization being punished? They need a reality check, even if they don't deserve the full brunt of economic consequences of AI.
But none of us deserve it.
Spinners and weavers 250 years ago did not deserved what happened to them.
These charming people people you cited, if your quotes are representative of their mindset and attitude, deserve everything that will happed to them.
(objectively, having to go back to jobs they did few years ago before they learned that drawing robot pirate Harry Potter fucking werevolf ninja Darth Vader in Japanese schoolgirl uniform is good gig)
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They say that "justice" is receiving what one deserves, seeing what one would inflict on others inflicted upon one's self...
...and that is why the wise man never prays for justice, he prays for mercy.
"Let justice reign, though the heavens should fall on my own head" is I think an underrated sentiment. He who prays for mercy fears an excess of justice. But the distance between the natural state and pareto optimal justice spans a great degree of judgment.
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