What OpenAI and similar companies want to achieve is for us to literally let them think for us with their AI, for them to “think” the ideas for us, reason for us, make the decisions for us, and be the creative and intellectual engine of humanity. “For world domination?”, no, just for profit.
They want to make us dependent on their services so they can then charge us a fortune for their regurgitated ideas. Cuz at this moment the only way to make insane amounts of profit is to take away form us all that we want and need. Our labor, our attention, our reasoning, Everything.
"Welcome, My son.
Welcome to The Machine
What did you dream?
It’s alright,
We Told You What To Dream"
Someone pointed out that capitalism loves subscriptions and rentals. They can sell you a widget, sure, but then they only get money once. If they can rent you a widget, then they get money forever.
AI is a path for rent skills to people. You don’t need to learn to write python or learn Spanish. Just pay for LLM access. Rent the skill.
It is extremely dystopian.
Unfortunately, most people don’t care about much of anything. You could tell them, with undeniable proof, that every AI search kills a puppy, and most people would be like “well puppies die anyway and I always use Google, so…”
That would be the case if corporations owned all the LLMs. However, it is possible to run open weights LLMs locally on your one hardware.
It’s possible to buy music, too, but most people rent it from spotify. Most people aren’t going to do the comparably hard thing of setting up their own LLM.
And even if they did run their own well tuned, ethical, LLM to write letters for them, that still leaves us with the problem of “people aren’t developing core skills like writing”
Here’s a fun question: Do you own the music you buy on a CD? Or is the CD just the license to listen to music that belongs legally to someone else?
Depends on what you mean by “own”.
Buying the CD has a key difference from Spotify in that no one can (typically) take the cd away from you. Music disappears from Spotify all the time. You can also (typically) copy it to other storage. And, most relevant to the topic of rent vs buy, you just pay for it once and you’re done. No subscription, no ads. That stuff is important to me.
You can’t usually take music you got from a CD and put it in your movie, for example, but that’s a whole conversation about fair use and copyright.
I understand completely but your argument is more medium based than ownership based, that was my only real point.
Rent the Skill for sure. If this is the skill you are expected to be an expert or at least experienced you would avoid it as much as possible to avoid being dependent.