But the most reasonable take, which I'm happy to see reflected in so many comments in this thread, is… use both.

Do an AI pass, and have humans verify, and vice versa. Let the humans drive the AI. Then the unique shortcomings of each party can be covered by the other's strengths.

It might beat an underresourced human review, on time, efficiency, cost metrics. But on the metric of accuracy, throwing unlimited humans at a problem will still beat throwing unlimited AI at it

You can do that, sure. But doing so negates any improvements in speed the LLM brought. And at that point, you may as well just do it yourself to begin with.

I use GenAI tools when coding a lot, but I do not vibe code. I go through everything it generated, and we iterate. And yes, it doesn't save me a lot of time. But what it does do is free up mental capacity in a similar manner. But instead of syntax, it's more complicated patterns. Maybe I don't remember how to stitch something together, but i know it can be done. Instead of spending the time to look it up and then code it, I just tell it to do it for me.

That's how I use the current AI, too. I never ask them to do something without specifying how it should be done. I ask questions first, use /plan to let the model ask me questions, then I let it execute the plan while reviewing the results. More and more often, I get something close enough to what I would have written. In the opposite case, I at least know exactly how to rewrite the result, if needed.

I observe the same effect as you: while it does sometimes speed up the implementation a bit, it's not very noticeable; however, it frees me from having to recall all the obscure little details up front. Instead, I can describe them, have the model implement them, and then recognize them (and refresh my memory) when reviewing. The effect is that it's easier to start a task because I don't need to prepare as much to execute it. It's especially notable on things that I haven't touched for some time. I know, more or less, how my Elixir projects are set up, but after ~2 years of not working on them, getting back into them had been a hassle - with AI, it's no longer that. I think the biggest difference comes from the AI lowering the cost of context switching for me - I used to have huge problems with that, and AI certainly helped a lot.

We could do with less speed.

Or are current AIs too similar for that to be fruitful?

For example, what if you're a tiny startup and you're considering whether to hire an extra engineer or do all the coding yourself. I would estimate that AI is worth far more than $18,000 a year in that situation where you might reasonably decide to put off hiring an engineer.

For example, I created a useful organization at my school before I graduated. That was twenty years ago. It still exists, and people are still benefiting from it. But they don't somehow owe me compensation, nor would I go around saying that they're somehow exploiting me or expropriating my labor just because they're benefiting from what I've done in the past.

Your story doesn't really relate. I get what you are saying, but your org wasn't copyrighted under you, nor did you expect any monetary returns on it. They stole copyrighted work without permission.

Sure, my bad.

> They stole copyrighted work without permission.

While we're nitpicking language, you can't "steal" copyrighted work. Theft/stealing are crimes that apply to situation where property is taken such that its rightful owner no longer has it. Copyright has nothing to do with theft. There is no taking of property involved. Copyright is a violation of a limited monopoly granted to a person/company to be the only one allowed to make copies.

Anyway, for a more substantive point, I think it remains to be seen that training an intelligence on information is the same thing as violating a copyright. For example, nobody would claim it's a copyright violation for a budding author to train his skills by reading tons of books.

But even setting the law aside, just morally, it doesn't seem like it should be any sort of violation. Of course, many people don't like that AI companies are getting rich, but that should be irrelevant. The fact is that nobody is harmed or deprived. Nobody's work is even redistributed. And prevention is easy -- if you don't want people/companies/AIs/etc learning from the material you put out, then keep it secret.

What seems morally bankrupt to me is this idea that anyone should be entitled to control what others are allowed to learn from. If you put information or work out into the public, that should not make you some sort of God who should control whether other people can learn from it or not.

The fact that these companies don't just remove copyrighted work from their product creation chain shows that they feel they are deriving value from the copyrighted works that they wouldn't have if they didn't use copyrighted works.

If THE PRODUCT (not the creators) requires access to someone else's work, to generate it's value it is derivative.'

This is actual law, with actual thought put into it, created over 300 years and is a huge part of what has created the modern world. No one can tell me why this thinking should be suddenly thrown out in a reasoned way that again, addresses the 300 years of things that has gone into this.

We live in a world where "creating value" (doing things that others find helpful) and "capturing value" (getting those people to pay you money) are two different things. If I give my mom a hug, I'm creating value, but that's not necessarily something I'm going to charge her for it. Most value created by people won't ever be captured. And that's a good thing imo.

It keeps the world moving, removes friction, and allows for authenticity. There's nothing wrong with wanting to capture value, of course. But the second you do that, you're a business. And "capturing value" has a huge set of tasks and responsibilities you now have to handle.

But there's an intuition that has gradually built up over centuries, alongside the growth of "intellectual property" as a concept. It's best paraphrased as, "I want to be compensated for the value I create, without doing any of the work to capture it. And if someone else finds an ingenious way to capture some of the value that I've created, then they should pay me."

To some degree, I understand and agree with the sentiment.

Nothing is built in a vacuum. No person or company is an island. Everything is built on top of public infrastructure and works created by the country, laid by our forefathers. This is just one of many reasons why I believe in a progressive tax system. To the extent that you're able to capture large amounts of value in America, a lot of that is made possible by the infra you're building on top of, which is owned by the public, and a progressive tax system is a good way to to share that with the public.

(Of course, this has its own problems, bc the government collecting taxes is not enough, it has to spend those funds wisely, for the benefit of all. Which it obviously doesn't do, at the federal level, or at many state and city levels. So I've always found it a bit perplexing for people to clamor for more taxation while caring little about how tax revenues are spent. But that's a discussion for another time.)

But overall, I don't like this intuition, because it's essentially rent-seeking behavior.

Capturing value is hard. Simply creating value is not enough. If you write a song, or you build an app, or you cook a meal, you still have all your work ahead of you to find a customer/consumer, and understand what they find valuable enough to pay for, and ensure your offering matches that, and do the marketing/sales to get it in front of them, and convince them to pay, and scale to more people, and manage your books, and do all of this profitably.

Expecting to be paid for simply creating value but doing none of the work to capture the value to me feels a little bit entitled. Or, at the very least, naive.

What's interesting is that certain industries have more or less entitlement here, depending on the influence of "intellectual property" in that industry.

For example, there's almost no concept of intellectual property in the cooking. If you invent a new recipe, you can't really patent it and tell everybody else that they're not allowed to make it. So, pretty much every chef is okay with the fact that they need to actually capture value by opening a restaurant or going to work for one.

It's similar in the software industry, where rather than patenting all of our software and trying to enforce it, we generally do the opposite and release software in an open-source way. We're quite aware that if we want to profit, we'll need to start our own startup, and we have no qualms with that.

But with writing, music, etc., you see a lot more creators who want to just do the creation part, who don't want to do the business part, but who then want the profits that the business part enables.

I can empathize for sure, I get it. But I think a world with less rent-seeking behavior is better. A world where more people understand what it takes to capture value and are willing to do it (or happy to just not do it) is a better world. A world where more people feel entitled to the profits earned by those who are able to capture value, I think, is worse.

We haven't gotten to where we are in the world today by giving the wealthy huge permanent advantages. Look at the explosion in innovation that has happened since public education has become widespread. It used to be only the wealthy that could afford to be educated. Part of what makes capitalism work at all is by not allowing the means to capture value to be monopolized.

Copyright benefits huge corporations way more than "the little guy." The biggest holders of copyrights and patents are huge corporations, many of which are often bought explicitly for the purpose of warding off competition from new upstarts.

These huge companies (e.g. Disney) also use their massive war chests to lobby the government into extending copyright terms. What used to just be 14 years of a limited monopoly has now been extended to hundreds of years. They're quite literally capturing and monopolizing the value.

When you look at what the average person does, generally speaking, it has little to do with patents and copyrights. The massive amount of creation and creativity we've seen online, with people riffing on art, music, video, code, etc., has largely involved infringing on copyrights held by the rich and powerful, and hoping to god we don't get sued.

Meaning:

(1) Copyright is in no way necessary for encouraging creativity, which was its original mandate. The evidence is in, and people create and innovate a ton without needing to have some sort of monopoly on everything they do.

(2) Far from protecting the little guy from the big guy, copyright has done the exact opposite, given the big guys huge legal recourse to sue little guys into oblivion, block innovation, block competition, and profit forever.

"The means of production" is an antiquated idea. Look at the reality on the ground. Producing and distributing has never been easier, never been more available to the masses, never been more popular. Big companies do not have a monopoly on the means. This whole copyright nonsense is an idea from the days when the printing press was a new invention, and the average person couldn't print. That's no longer true today.

Also, just from a theory perspective, we never made it so that you can copyright and patent recipes, no matter how creative they are. And yet, mom and pop restaurants have always flourished. Copyrights aren't enforced heavily in the software industry. In fact, just the opposite: we have open source. And yet, individual developers can thrive. This idea that without copyright, big companies are just going to steal everything from the little guy and the little guy will have no chance is just not true. The places where you see that happening the most are the places that have the strongest copyright protections, e.g. the music industry, the publishing industry, etc.

"Training on other people's work" has always been free for anyone to do for the entire history of humanity, and that shouldn't change. You do not get paid just because somebody read your work and learned from it, nor should you, unless you want to gatekeep it and charge for access.

As Jefferson said, "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

> …to not only capture their value in ways the little guy can't…

So what? Big companies can do things that little companies can't. That's always been true and always will be true. What does this have to do with copyright?

> …but to replace them outright

Computers replaced jobs. Cars replaced jobs. AI is replacing jobs. Etc. So what? What does this have to do with copyright?

How is it different in a way that's relevant here?

> My point is that even if someone did want to do the work, the benefit would go to the people with the money and infrastructure to act on it.

That's not true. Millions of entrepreneurs every year create companies, and do hard work, and capture value, without having to rely on copyrights/patents.

> In your vision, IBM would just take Windows and slap their name on it. Where would that have left Microsoft?

In a different world, things would be different. So? That doesn't mean that world would be worse.

For example, imagine a world where recipes are patentable. The inventor of pizza would own Pizza, Inc., and no one else on earth would be allowed to make or sell pizza. It would be their intellectual property. And Disney would buy up tons of food patents and own an exclusive license to make french fries and cookies and milkshakes. And someone in that world would ask the same question you're asking, "Omg, without recipe patents, Gil Bates never would've been able to start Spaghetti, Inc., because The Olive Garden would've just been allowed to make spaghetti, too! What a nightmare!" But here we are, living in a universe where everyone can make spaghetti, and no one else has the right to tell other people they're not allowed to make spaghetti just because some other guy did it first. And it's just fine.

> Computers and cars don’t rely on the intellectual output of others to function.

Sure, different inventions work differently. What does that matter?

Maybe a better example would be to explain how drug companies are able to cover the cost of research and development, or how Studio Ghibli is able to invest in animating a movie that anyone can sell. Should everyone provide the full suite of services a business needs in order to earn a profit? That seems like an inefficient way to organize the economy. The mechanical engineer also has to be a marketer or else he doesn't deserve to be paid for an invention? How does that make sense?

> Sure, different inventions work differently. What does that matter?

You cut the sentence that answers the question.

- Let's take music, for example, which is a form of content. Where do artists make most of their money? From touring, from actually going out and playing, which is a form of labor.

- Let's look at code, which is another form of content. How do tech startups make most of their money? From copyrighting and licensing their code? No. From hosting and serving it, which is a form of digital labor.

- Etc.

Drug companies I'm sure would find a way. They would just have to transition from being intellectual property holders (making money on high margins) to being service and manufacturing specialists. But people would find a way to make a profit, just like they do in every other competitive industry.

The idea that you need copyrights and patents in order to spur investment, research, creativity, or capitalistic enterprise is completely false, and thoroughly disproven.

How do you know? This sounds like an unverified rumor.

The point is that, on average, individual experiences are improving, decade by decade. Humanity is doing a remarkable job.

Yet, in the grand scheme of things, the world has gotten better in that time. Which is how you know these people are wrong, at least most of the time.

The challenge with positive news is that you have to go seek it out. It will rarely come to you. And then you have to greet it without cynicism, which many are incapable of.

Drugs are out of control. Homeless are everywhere. No one has interests in anything. No one is having kids. All jobs are going to be gone soon. Colleges can't teach (it's all AI cheating now). People are Gang Robbing stores. Cartels are killing hundreds daily. Fraud is out of control. We have 2 maybe 3 world wars going on simultaneously now. Prices are skyrocketing.

Yeah I get why you say "pretty much". lol PS good luck buying a house

My daughter's English professor is now requiring people to hand write their essays during class. So at least there is that.

But it's very difficult to measure the costs, bc the #1 cost is lost trust, and how do you measure that? Many people simply won't sign up for a Google product bc they don't trust it'll be around long enough to justify the investment. These people don't show up in any metrics that you can reason about, and they're the least likely to take any surveys you might send out. At best, Google can guess what the impact is, and they might be wildly underestimating.

I think a different strategic decision they could've made (and still could make!) would be to the do the opposite, and prioritize the benefits of keep projects alive over the costs of ruthlessly sunsetting then.

They could say, "You know what, we have considerable resources. When we release something new, we're going to dedicate ourselves to keeping it running indefinitely." They wouldn't have to market them, or advertise them, or connect them to every new part of the evolving Google ecosystem, or make them particularly easy to find, or even keep them open to new signups. But just keeping them running as-is, indefinitely, and having customers tell each other, "It's Google, you can trust it, it's not going away," would be such a great PR win.

I think the real cost/risk here is not financial, but strategic, i.e. preventing a loss of focus.

It’s not about investing any given portion of revenues, it’s investing optimally. There are opportunity costs that must be considered in investments (and that means Net Present Value calculations).

Google’s revenue and profits are for the shareholders. When revenue is directed back into the business the question simply isn’t if the whole business will make money, it’s if this investment is optimally profitable considering all the alternatives. If a support engineer on Google+ generates $X over 5 years, but that same resource would generate $3X working on Gemini then dictating eternal Google+ support is robbing future Google of revenue.

Investments need to be individually justified, but also better than the alternatives to make fiscal sense. Even though that sucks for pleased consumers.

Maybe if Google had those support engineers on Google+ for 5 years generating $X, that would've created enough trust that Gemini could now generate $4X.