I’m just now starting my degree is software engineering. I’m 31. I’d gotten comfortable enough with Linux that I wanted to try NixOS to avoid having my system get borked again (in my case, KDE Plasma started having shell crashes at log in).

If I was only using NixOS to run a basic computer set up? Sure, no problem. If I want to rice and customize it? No, I wasn’t ready.

I know it’s not for everyone, but my Light Phone III arrives soon and tech headlines of late aren’t making me regret my choice.

My take: if Rossman came out swinging as an anti-corporate revolutionary, his ideas wouldn’t have wide appeal right now, since many people still think the problem is just “bad” mega-corporations. So instead, he’s arguing for less-shitty tech corporations as a first step (symbolized by Clippy, of a less-intrusive software age), rather than “destroy all tech corpos now.” No, Microsoft wasn’t good then, but they were less awful.

If his video were starkly anti-capitalist, it would not have reached 2.5 million people, and I’d say getting that many people to start thinking about rejecting invasive software is a great step in the right direction, as opposed to ideological purism that would only resonate with those who already agree. The need for these baby steps is frustrating for those who already see the big picture, but a few chats with my coworkers quickly reveal how shockingly little some people have actually thought about the sins of big tech.

Agreed. The problem is that so many (including in this thread) argue that training AI models is no different than training humans—that a human brain inspired by what it sees is functionally the same thing.

My response to why there is still an ethical difference revolves around two arguments: scale, and profession.

Scale: AI models’ sheer image output makes them a threat to artists where other human artists are not. One artist clearly profiting off another’s style can still be inspiration, and even part of the former’s path toward their own style; however, the functional equivalent of ten thousand artists doing the same is something else entirely. The art is produced at a scale that could drown out the original artist’s work, without which such image generation wouldn’t be possible in the first place.

Profession. Those profiting from AI art, which relies on unpaid scraping of artists’s work for data sets, are not themselves artists. They are programmers, engineers, and the CEOs and stakeholders who can even afford the ridiculous capital necessary in the first place to utilize this technology at scale. The idea that this is just a “continuation of the chain of inspiration from which all artists benefit” is nonsense.

As the popular adage goes nowadays, “AI models allow wealth to access skill while forbidding skill to access wealth.”