Let me start this by asking: what do you want to see here at HoGA moving forward?
I’ve lost the interest and energy for the interviewing process. I don’t want to spend my life doing something I don’t love, and I just don’t love sending out interviews any more. I appreciate everyone who took the time to participate in this project and exploration—thank you for your time, energy, and thoughtfulness.
To my few paid subscribers, please feel free to cancel or switch over to free. I’d love to refund you for the last few months as soon as my financial situation improves. Please reach out to me directly if that’s something you’d like and I’ll make arrangements with you to get you your money back.
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I’m usually a little long-winded, so I’ll keep this short-ish.
It’s clear these GenAI models are capable of “rapid” development.
With that in mind, I can’t stop thinking about the training data. I hope my voice has echoed that I tend to agree with the ethical arguments about the training data.
Artists who posted their work online with the intention of self-promotion/marketing already likely had it pretty rough. There’s a lot of trial and error in finding success as a creator/artist.
Questions that I keep thinking about, that I don’t really have the answer for:
What is the responsibility of a business to their employees who contributed time, energy, and thoughtfulness to the growth of the business?
What is the responsibility of a business that uses artists’ work without attribution or renumeration to train a GenAI model that the business is profiting from?
What is the responsibility of a business to the planet given the colossal energy consumption of training and utilizing GenAI tools?
If a business can afford train a GenAI model for profit, why can’t they afford to retain and reskill their human employees to continue to grow the company alongside the GenAI tools they’re using?
What is the responsibility of an individual who utilizes a GenAI tool?
If that tool was built on training data that uses artists’ work without attribution or renumeration, is it unethical for an individual to utilize the GenAI tool?
I say business in a lot of these questions.
I’ve come to understand business as a group of people acting in a specific way to accomplish specific goals. When we use a term like business, it’s easy to forget there are humans at the helm, decision-makers who say: this is the way we’re going to do it.
If I’m to believe everything I read in the media, then: isn’t the way we’re doing it why we’re crashing headfirst into a pit of disasters?
There’s a lot more I could say here, but I promised to be short-ish. Just wanted to leave some food for thought while I figure out and retool this experience.
Thanks for coming along this journey.
These are an great questions to which I have no answers. But I'm wondering if there should be a model similar to how libraries compensate authors. There is a pool of money and any author with a book in the system receives percentage of that money every year. I don't know the algorithms used to decide who gets how much or how it would work if how much of an artist's work has been used to train a system can't be measured (maybe it can). But it seems to me that this might be a starting point.
As to what you should publish here, what does your heart say? Personally, I'll read anything you write as I like the way you're mind works.