Unfortunately, that’s about as likely as the tech giants paying for the data they use to train their models.

The thing is: even under the status quo, AI is already a money-losing venture due to its enormous energy consumption alone (only a fraction of the actual costs). If the tech giants were now required to cover the costs they currently avoid by misusing public infrastructure and stealing the work of others, there is simply no business model that would be profitable.

Even if additional revenue—such as from advertising (Google’s main source of income)—were to be added, which will almost inevitably happen sooner or later, it doesn’t account for the tech giants having to cover the additional costs they would incur if things were done properly.

Or to put it another way: The hype would come to an abrupt end if the courts did not rule in favor of the billionaires. Because then AI would not be economically viable to operate, at least not with those LLMs that the tech giants tout as all-knowing “artificial intelligence,” which is intended to be used by the general public as well as by companies to supposedly replace workers.

In short: Not only are the promises regarding the technology’s potential massively exaggerated, but the corresponding business models are also built on sand—they simply cannot work if the tech giants were also required to bear the costs they are legitimately obligated to bear.

Edit: Given this context, in my view there can really only be two reasons why the tech giants are still investing so heavily in AI:

1. It is a “pump and dump” scheme of unprecedented scale, because the major investors will still make enormous profits even when the bubble bursts, since they are the ones keeping the hype alive and will therefore be the first to sell their shares with profit before everything collapses.

2. It is an attempt by billionaires to centralize the world to their advantage, because multi-billion-dollar corporations are the only ones capable of covering the astronomical costs of developing AI models and operating them. Consequently, they are also the only ones who stand to profit from the widespread adoption of the technology. A bit like in the Middle Ages, when the monopoly on knowledge lay exclusively with the clergy: The billionaires would have absolute interpretive authority—exclusive control over the medium and thus, in a sense, also over what is generally accepted as truth, which narratives are socially accepted, and so on. It would multiply their current, already enormous power yet again.

I think it’s a bit of both.

That sounds like very little, considering that anyone still working under this criminal regime at the DOJ is clearly making themselves liable to prosecution.

Obstruction of justice, blatant corruption, and the resulting facilitation of the most serious crimes simply don’t look all too good if you don’t want to end up in prison or, as a lawyer, at least want to keep your license - but hey, the U.S. isn’t exactly a constitutional state tbh: Presumably, the remaining opportunists are speculating on a nice position in the emerging autocracy, which then won’t even need to keep up the pretense anymore.

Who can blame them for trying, when we see every day that even blatant crimes in the U.S. have absolutely no legal consequences?

It’s been almost 40 years since the late 1980s. That’s certainly a historical context, especially since it has had such a profound impact on the world we live in today - not for the better, if you ask me.

Wouldn’t that mean that KPIs need to be applied to the output, just as they are to employees’ work? Otherwise, no comparison would be possible at all: To measure how much time an employee saves by using AI, one must measure the value of the AI’s output. If you don’t do that, the time savings could be attributed to any other factor - such as the employee working overtime because they don’t want to be replaced by AI, which in this scenario is simply not possible because, due to the lack of metrics, it is unknown whether AI can replace the employee at all.

This is an approach that could never succeed in the U.S., because there the focus is always on throwing as much money as possible at the defense contractors so that the billionaires can get even richer.

A current example: the war of aggression against Iran that the U.S. is waging in violation of international law.

To my knowledge, not even a halfway plausible reason has been given for this. And so it becomes quite clear that this is simply about shifting state resources into the pockets of the super-rich - and U.S. citizens just go along with it, even though it isn’t even them who are dying by the thousands, but rather, among others, Iranian schoolchildren, hundreds of whom were murdered simply by a bombing of a school…

It doesn’t matter that you’re not a scientist. Your approach is still interesting - and yes: maybe it will inspire people or even spur research on these topics. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

That is true, of course, but LLMs, image and video generation, and so on, will, in my view, lead to fewer and fewer people being willing to publish their creative works, because the staggering output of AI models will not only make it increasingly unlikely that they will receive compensation for their work, but also that they will receive recognition for it.

As a result, I think, there will likely be fewer and fewer people willing to accept that their work is being used for free to train precisely those models from which only the people who steal their work benefit - without this theft, the business model of OpenAI and the like simply cannot function.

In my view, this will sooner or later lead to a vicious cycle in which the models are trained predominantly only with content they have generated themselves. This will then lead to a stagnation of what we understand as culture - for these models are neither creative nor intelligent: they can merely combine existing content to create something that appears new; however, they cannot produce anything truly new. Nevertheless, given its ever-expanding reach, it will likely be this repetitive AI output that has a significant influence on popular culture, at the very least.

That sounds very interesting - please keep us posted.

I think it’s very important to examine the effects of LLMs on society, how they influence discourse, their impact on the formation of public opinion, and the question of whether - and if so, to what extent - they shift the interpretation of words and narratives toward the few corporations that offer cloud models, and so on.

This is a broad field, but one that strikes me as quite important from a wide variety of perspectives.

It’s good to hear that there are people here who are looking into this from a scientific standpoint. I’d be very happy if you could update us on the state of research from time to time.

The more perspectives there are on this topic, the better.

Yes, that’s probably how it will go.

Culture will likely always exist, but unfortunately it’s now increasingly competing with an even more massive, uniform, and uncreative flood of commercial bullshit.

I fear this will have a disastrous effect. The early signs are already very clear: misinformation on a massive scale, the centralization of “interpretive authority” in the hands of just a few, very powerful companies, and so on.

It’s not as if the internet wasn’t already full of what you might call products of the culture industry, but now these products aren’t even produced by people anymore -instead they’re churned out automatically in an all-consuming flood of mediocrity.

Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na… BATMAN!

AI is a new way of combining what already exists. Moreover, these models serve as a tool of power for those who are already powerful.

“AI is good” is not a coherent argument.

The entertainment industry is obviously just one simple example.

The reason I mention this example is that you’ll have a hard time defining what culture is - and, consequently, why it makes sense to preserve it.

Attempting to engage in such a discussion on a social media platform is doomed to fail from the start.

I had assumed that what I mean would be clear enough. That’s why I included the comparison with climate change in the description.

I have no idea what you’re getting at, but it’s a fact that every minute - if not every second - AI-generated content is being published that you could never read in your entire lifetime.

That’s the scale we’re talking about.

Try to imagine what that might mean for people who make a living doing anything that could even remotely be called creative work.

I’m afraid it’s true this time. You do know how LLMs work, don’t you?

Edit: And you do have at least some idea of how the entertainment industry works, right?

Oh, right, they’re also responsible for the chemicals in the drinking water that turn everyone gay - I heard that from some super-reliable news outlets.

Yeah, that’s definitely the most likely explanation, but you can’t just say that… because of the lizard aliens.

No, the simplest answer is that these are just more smokescreens being thrown up to distract attention from all the crimes committed by the U.S. government.

UFOs and secret conspiracies are simply a good way to divert attention from actual conspiracies, as those quite clearly documented in the Epstein files, for example.

I see, so the Meta employees have the typical conservative mindset: any misdeed is perfectly fine as long as it doesn’t affect you personally.

That’s what I thought - it’s probably not just the employees of social media companies who feel this way, but also those at Palantir and similar. Not to mention the “defense” contractors and the like.

I really wonder how these people can still look at themselves in the mirror.

But he only did that for his disciple Jeffrey …you have to cut him some slack…

/s

My point is that US citizens could remove their criminal president, but they don’t do so despite all his criminal machinations and despite the most serious war crimes.