We are living in the age of thieving. Of thieving everything.
There are so many people who tout the benefits of AI without acknowledging that AI only exists because of theft. Theft of writing, theft of code, theft of art, theft of photography. Theft, you guys. Theft.
And somehow as a society we are all okay with a bunch of rich guys thieving from the greater good, putting all the people out of work who have been stolen from, and allowing this behavior to metastasize into something totally out of control over the span of a couple of years.
I write for a living. No, I don’t just write blogs or books. I wish I could make a living that way but I can’t. I make a living by writing for corporations and startups, and in the past for thought leaders and doctors. But now that’s all being stolen from me. How am I supposed to make a living when what I have to offer is suddenly perceived to have minimal value because of rampant theft?
Hint: My work does still have enormous value because machines don’t have discernment or voice. They simply ingest things and spit them out, regardless of accuracy and also without any care about how the information is being spit out.
Anyway.
I can’t express to the non-creative masses how it feels to be a writer or an artist and to have your work pirated to enrich some already rich entity. You’re suddenly pushed almost totally out of society because every skill you’ve ever used to make a living has been stolen, and the lesser rich guys at all the corporations want to leverage that stolen material to make a buck in an “it’s good enough and we don’t really care about our customers anyway” sort of way, and there is no government or benevolent human coming to make it right. And also, nobody to pay your bills, give you healthcare, or keep you fed in a world that suddenly doesn’t think you matter anymore.
This is kind of a vomit, I suppose. I struggle to get up in the morning some days because, as a creative, I have moved through the world and supported myself for the past 22 years by creating things – sentences, instructions, visuals. And now I am being told, from every direction, “We don’t want your creativity because we can get a good-enough version of it for free from a machine. And also, we don’t care how you survive because we only care about our bottom line. Bye.”
What a world, y’all. What a world.