When in politics, in exchange for a ministerial car, he reneged on his pledge on student grants, and in coalition enabled a punishing austerity programme and the prime minister who delivered the Brexit referendum.
It would be wise to treat everything he says or supports with the utmost circumspection.
AI is clearly a net negative to humanity in its current form, and almost certainly all future forms.
The fact that you refer to an actual human being as “some artist” betrays the absolute disdain you hold for humanity and in my opinion should disqualify you from polite discourse of any kind.
> AI is clearly a net negative to humanity in its current form, and almost certainly all future forms.
I'm going to make an equally supported and valid statement here and say AI is clearly a net positive to humanity in its current form, and almost certainly all future forms.
You should consider providing a less hyperbolic point to argue if you are looking to have any kind of productive or healthy discussion on the internet.
There I fixed it for you. If it's such a net benefit to humanity governments should provide 6-months-behind-the-state-of-the-art-model for free to the public to make up for the highway robbery of its citizens' lifelong digital output.
If your premise was right, it makes even less sense as a justification for using other peoples' IP without compensation.
AI companies are for profit organizations in a largely capitalist world. If what they're providing is so massively more valuable to humanity than artists' IP, then the AI companies should easily be able to monetize that value in a way that allows them to fairly compensate the artists for the crucial role they're apparently playing in AI development.
Of course scale is the real problem here, because we're not just talking about AI companies compensating "some artists", but likely "all artists". This probably is financially untenable since the current value AI is providing to society seems unlikely to be greater than the value of all IP that exists in the world.
But that's not some critical feature of AI, it just speaks to the way current AI models work where you take every bit of text and images that exists and throw it into a data center full of GPUs to burn through a large city's worth of electricity until something approximating human text and image generation pops out. Arguably that approach is driven by the fact that GPUs and electricity are affordable and the input data is "free" if you're willing to steal it. I see no reason to believe less wasteful models couldn't produce good results without requiring the input being all human knowledge, and you'd save some electricity and resources in the meantime.
Edit: I'm not an AI researcher, but I also think incentivizing more efficient approaches to AI model development and training might yield more human-like AI (i.e. actual AI rather than turbo charged autocomplete). Humans also develop our cognitive abilities by absorbing external information but we manage to do it by absorbing a fraction of the information as a large-scale AI model with significantly better results. Focusing on whatever difference is behind that rather than building ever larger data centers with ever more powerful GPUs might be an interesting shift.
I actually agree with him on this though, AI is a bigger net benefit to humanity than some artists' IP.