That's a long-winded way of spelling out a a Dog in the Manger approach to society, coupled with huge entitlement issues:
There is something valuable to others, that I neither built nor designed, but because I might have touched it once and left a paw print, I feel hurt no one wants to pay me rent for the valuable thing, and because of that, I want to destroy it so no one can have it.
Point 2) operates on a spectrum, there's plenty of cases where human work has no agency or free will behind it - in fact, it's very common in industrialized societies.
RE 3), "engineers" and "operators" are distinct; "engineers" make money because they provide something of immense value - something that exists only because of collective result of 1), but any individual contribution to it is of no importance. The value comes from the amount and diversity and how it all is processed. "Operators" usually pay "engineers" for access, and then they may or may not use it to provide some value to others, or themselves.
In the most basic case, "engineers" are OpenAI, and "operators" are everyone using ChatGPT app (both free and paid tiers).
RE 4) That's the sense of entitlement right there. Motivations from point 1. have already been satisfied; the value delivered by GenAI is a new thing, a form of reprocessing to access a new kind of value that was not possible to extract before, and that is not accessible to any individual creator, because (again) it comes from sheer bulk and diversity of works, not from any individual one.
IMO, individual creators have a point about AI competing with them for their jobs. But that's an argument against deployment and about what the "operators" do with it; it's not an argument against training.
Your dog quote seems to mean the opposite of the rest of your comment. We’re talking about destruction of the idea of creative work as product of specific living and breathing, at least at some point in time, humans by companies with market caps the size of countries wishing they could charge everyone rent for access to something someone else made without licensing it.
> human work has no agency or free will behind it
There is one case where it is sort of true, but crucially 1) agency still exists, it is just restricted, and 2) it is called “slavery”. I felt like your comment not only equates a human being with freedom/agency (whether restricted or not) to a software tool, it also equates “I have to do my job because it pays money” with having brutally been robbed of freedom, which really underplays how bad the latter is.
> something that exists only because of collective result of 1), but any individual contribution to it is of no importance
Collective result, which consists of individual works. That argument appears to be “if we steal enough, then it is okay”.
> Motivations from point 1. have already been satisfied
We exist over time, not only in the past. A swath of motivations for doing any original work is going away for upcoming original work on which chatbots etc. are built.
> that is not accessible to any individual creator, because (again) it comes from sheer bulk and diversity of works, not from any individual one
Yes, humans can be inspired and build upon a huge diversity of works, like what has been happening for as long as humanity existed (you may have heard the phrase “everything is a remix”). If you talk to me and I previously read Kant then who knows, whatever you create may have been inspired by Kant.
Libraries have done great job at amplifying that ability. Search engines put massive datasets at your fingertips while maintaining attribution (you are always directed to the source), connection of authors and readers, and sometimes even offering ways of earning money (of course, profiting off it as well; the beauty of capitalism). I am sure there are plenty of other examples of ML models in various fields that achieved great results yet were trained on appropriately licensed work. In other words, none of this does justify theft.
There is something valuable to others, that I neither built nor designed, but because I might have touched it once and left a paw print, I feel hurt no one wants to pay me rent for the valuable thing, and because of that, I want to destroy it so no one can have it.
Point 2) operates on a spectrum, there's plenty of cases where human work has no agency or free will behind it - in fact, it's very common in industrialized societies.
RE 3), "engineers" and "operators" are distinct; "engineers" make money because they provide something of immense value - something that exists only because of collective result of 1), but any individual contribution to it is of no importance. The value comes from the amount and diversity and how it all is processed. "Operators" usually pay "engineers" for access, and then they may or may not use it to provide some value to others, or themselves.
In the most basic case, "engineers" are OpenAI, and "operators" are everyone using ChatGPT app (both free and paid tiers).
RE 4) That's the sense of entitlement right there. Motivations from point 1. have already been satisfied; the value delivered by GenAI is a new thing, a form of reprocessing to access a new kind of value that was not possible to extract before, and that is not accessible to any individual creator, because (again) it comes from sheer bulk and diversity of works, not from any individual one.
IMO, individual creators have a point about AI competing with them for their jobs. But that's an argument against deployment and about what the "operators" do with it; it's not an argument against training.