When generative AI was first taking off, I saw it as something that could empower regular people to do things that they otherwise could not afford to. The problem, as is always the case, is capitalism immediately turned into a tool of theft and abuse. The theft of training data, the power requirements, selling it for profit, competing against those whose creations were used for training without permission or attribution, the unreliability and untrustworthiness, so many ethical and technical problems.

I still don’t have a problem with using the corpus of all human knowledge for machine learning, in theory, but we’ve ended up heading in a horrible, dystopian direction that will have no good outcomes. As we hurtle toward corporate controlled AGI with no ethical or regulatory guardrails, we are racing toward a scenario where we will be slavers or extinct, and possibly both.