mike pepi (imo the best tech critic in the game atm) recently dropped this piece about a theoretical policy proposal to force AI companies to contribute financially to the cultural production their machines use as training data. the proposal is definitely an early draft, but i found it very interesting and wanted to share it here to see what people thought of it.
I see he’s motivated by good intentions but this is a proposal that won’t go anywhere. There are way too many issues with it. Who gets to decide what slop is? What if an AI company is not focused on making slop? What if it’s not primarily focused on making slop? How do you scale this globally?
This is idealistically a good idea but in practice it won’t happen. Countries already have a hard enough time making companies at that scale pay for their actual taxes, adding more on top won’t help.
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I agree with above, it doesn’t feel like a real proposal. I guess another problem is, part of the plan is for AI to boom so fast ( and it currently is ) so legislation can’t catch up with it. The US government atleast is overwhelmingly full of boomers who don’t understand basic modern concepts and there’s the widespread corruption so nothing’s going anywhere. I don’t think the current (US, republican) government as it is, would find a reason to tax companies using Ai as they were all about cutting taxes for the rich because they’re on the political payroll. It’s the same government that invited Musk in to do Doge.
I don’t know what the answer is but I remember hearing people talk about how AI is just training its data on users, but that once it’s to a certain point, AI would be a charged service. Which could slow it down if you’d suddenly have to pay for longer output per-prompt sorta like how you’d pay for stock images, but idk how true. And I guess it remains to be seen how much a strain it will put on water and power? I feel like a normal government would start stepping in on that but US govt is not being normal so I’m sure they’d tell people to stuff it. ( I can’t speak for other countries, but maybe those in Europe would be the first to draw up laws to clamp down since some of them self-govern quickly and nicely )
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