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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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What really gets in my gears over this is how pointlessly these people are going to throw away the west's advantages to squeeze out just a couple more years of employment. Some country is not going to tell these sites to pound sand and unless you're going to stop them with guns and tanks your job is going to be outsourced to that country eventually. We are wasting very precious seconds trying to put a pin back into a grenade with our teeth.

What really gets in my gears over this is how pointlessly these people are going to throw away the west's advantages

Detractors of AI technology don't view this as an "advantage" in the way you're thinking of it.

Being the leader in AI is a bit like being the leader in bioweapons. Tactically prudent, so you don't get blindsided by your adversaries, but it's not something that gives you the warm fuzzies. It's the sort of thing that you wish wasn't necessary in the first place. And it's certainly not the sort of thing that you want floating around unaccounted for in private hands. You want it managed by the public sector, strictly regulated, under lock and key.

Some country is not going to tell these sites to pound sand

"It's legal over there so it should be legal here" is hardly a convincing argument. The issue here is that Stability is unjustly profiting off the work of artists without proper compensation. So what if other countries would let them do it with impunity? People do unjust things all the time, but that's no excuse for you to do the same.

Anyway, if it is a foregone conclusion that artists are all going to be out of a job and nothing they do matters either way, then that's just an even stronger argument for them to go after Stability now, just out of spite.