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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1294 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 19, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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AI labor currently has a tax advantage over human labor. I ask an AI to spit out a tax proposal where AI tokens were taxed a similar rate to humans that make 100k in the US. It made AIs something like 18x-850x more expensive. Which would make AIs economically non viable.

I do still feel that the tax advantage for AI labor is still morally wrong, but I don't want to effectively ban them. Is that just me?

How would you try to structure taxes such that the advantage disappears, but the AIs remain viable?

It made AIs something like 18x-850x more expensive

How did that work? If you’re paying $10/Mtokens, slap a 50% tax, aren’t you just paying 0.5x more?

It was comparing token output of a knowledge worker making about 100k a year. Which it estimated at 15-20 million tokens of human output. And then taxes on that person being about 30k. So tokens being taxed at 30k per 20 million.

The approach is not necessarily good, it's just what I started with when I had this thought.

So you’d tax per token, based on how much money would be paid to a human to do the same job? Seems extremely difficult to calculate in practice.

And what about local/self-hosted models? A decent GPU can easily output 20M tokens in a matter of hours, you leave it to summarise some PDFs overnight and suddenly you have to pay 30k?

Again, I didn't say this was a good method

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