The only winning move is not to play. Go to your local instrument library and grab your self a guitar. If your 401k vanishes, at least you know how to play the guitar and can entertain your self through the collapse of the system.

As does the intention matter. The AI companies are doing this because they want to profit off of it. They don’t have to do this, and the fact that they do is part of what makes them bad for humanity.

I pushed back on that comparison. These behaviors are in fact not comparable. What the AI companies are doing is bad actually, and what libraries are doing is, while unfortunate, acceptable, given the limited resources they have.

> Most public libraries do not have professional archivists

Most reasonably sized library systems do in fact. Even small ones have trained librarians with an some degree in library science who took at least an introductory class in archiving as a part of their degree, and very likely has some idea how to prevent rare books from being destroyed.

There is also a fundamental difference in intention. AI companies are seeking out old books and will destroy them. Public libraries are trying their best but simply don‘t have the resources to find rare books in every collection.

And finally there is a fundamental difference in scale. Public libraries are not buying millions of copies to destroy, completely eliminating the chance they will ever be discovered.

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PS. I don‘t like the anti-academic tone of your post. Librarians know what they are doing, their expertise is valuable, and when they act according to their specialized knowledge it does have a positive effect on the world.

After scanning and destroying 10 million books, AI companies will have destroyed 10 such books.

(I am obviously assuming a Poisson distribution here where I pulled the parameter p = 1/1000000 out of thin air; point is p is non-zero; and at this scale the undesirable event is bound to happen a bunch of times).

I assume no such things of AI companies.

AI companies buy boxes and boxes of books with unknown content staff anybody who can operate a scanner and have no idea which books they are destroying.

If a public library comes across a book they didn’t know they had, it is very likely that somebody will notice and know how to continue, to find out if this book is worth saving etc. AI companies will treat this book exactly like any other and destroy it to feed the plagiarist machine.

Plenty of such unknown unknown exist, and the AI machine will inevitably destroy a bunch of them at this scale.

Like did Icelandic author Þórbergur Þórðarson ever write an a book about Esperanto, and send the only copy of it to Halldór Laxness when he was in Los Angeles? I don‘t know, but it is certainly something he is likely to have done. If such a book exists it would be invaluable to both Icelandic culture and to Esprentists. It likely would have stayed in Los Angeles where nobody would know the significance of it until it ended up in an estate sale, a used book store, and then finally destroyed by an AI company never to be discovered.

My hypothetical is just one of trillions of possibilities. At this scale very likely several of these possibilities will unessiseraly remain unknown unknowns forever.

The advice in the title is a cop-out of someone who thinks writing with AI is fine actually, as long as you just don‘t paste the whole thing. In other words, it sounds like someone who thinks they can outsmart AI-writing by using AI differently.

I was open to the fact that this might be a clickbait (so I read the comments first) but from this post, it looks like my intuition was right.

To clarify, I am a firm believer you should not use AI for any part of your writing, no AI-drafts, no AI-skeletons, no AI-research, no AI-nothing. AI pollutes your writing, and just makes it bad however you use it.

A simpler rule of thumb (which I abide to) is just don‘t use AI at all. It is bad for your brain, and highly addictive, and also bad for society and the environment. When you use AI you are only putting bad stuff out in the world and supporting te AI-companies, who are profiting off of all this damage they are causing.

But I disagree though. Blaming human nature is much much easier. It means there is nothing we can do except give up and live with it.

In contrast, blaming the system means we can still change the system, and changing the system is extremely hard, especially when the rich and powerful have so much interest in keeping the system the way it is.

In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.

I probably should engage with these claims as they are written, but I don’t think anything here is in good faith. I am clearly engaging with somebody who is full of hate, so much so they deny (or even support) a genocide.

Food aid organizations were highly critical of Live-aid’s logistics, claimed it would not work because the food just gets looted by the armed factions who will use it to buy more weapons. Live-aid distribute the food anyway, and yes, a lot of it went to the armed factions, but overall food became less scarce and fewer people were hungry.

I think food is one of these things we should just not fuck around with. Wherever people need food, it should be delivered, unconditionally. The food exists, and the distribution networks exist, the only thing preventing people from getting it is most of the time money. Getting food to e.g. Darfur is very expensive (due to bribes etc.), and very few charities can afford it, governments however can afford it, but simply choice not to.

But even outside of armed conflict, where things do get messy, we are still failing people miserably. Many earthquake survivors in Indonesia are now hungry, and food is not being delivered to them. And there is absolutely no excuse why the international society is failing them (except via capitalism).

However this 90% estimate is cherry picked. It is one report at one time, during a time when Israel was intentionally starving Palestinians during a genocide.