Software defies economics. It can be replicated almost infinitely at almost no cost. When software companies sold software one package at a time in the 90s anti-piracy was a big deal because it was very simple for any given person to “copy a floppy” and receive the full package of software from another individual without the company knowing or being involved. It was like borrowing a rake from a neighbor, but the neighbor got to keep his rake as well.

Because of this, software companies decided instead to treat software as a service rather than as a product. In the 2010s many software companies shifted to the subscription model where instead of selling software one package at a time, the service of the software would be available to rent while the company guarded the propriety aspects of their software. This was like the company owning the rake and both you and your neighbor needed to pay the company to borrow the rake.

Now software can be reverse-engineered without the source-code. Now if you rent the rake from the company, you can keep a copy of it and freely distribute it without the company being involved or aware. I’m not sure how software companies will reckon with this advancement.

There isn’t any individual, institution, or system which could manage the interaction between AGI and every human who has access to it. LLMs are already manipulating people to do extreme things. There’s no telling what AGI and a few million idiots might do.

At some point in my life new technology started adding problems to life instead of managing them.

A windmill can pulverize more grain per hour than thousands of humans crushing the grains with their bare hands. Ancient humans make modern humans look like amateurs.

Having read the compared stories now, I have to say I’m deeply offended at the results. The AI stories are quicker to read because they are chains of cliches which state and restate the theme of the story (as stated in the prompt) outright instead of demonstrating it through the charged and personal perspectives of the characters. The LLM generated text is meaningless word sausage formatted to be easier to read for people who don’t read much. I have never read something more cynical, and I have read plenty of trash by authors who hate their audience and consider them all to be idiots.

This is like comparing landscape paintings to photographs of the same landscape from the same perspective and asking random people to judge which one they think is better. This is an insane comparison.

LLM companies may now freely commit corporate espionage because the news media is locked into reporting the claims that LLMs are capable of things like this as fact. This is like when the US bombed the girls school in Iran and blamed it on AI and the news reported it as fact until it was clear reasonable people weren’t willing to accept that excuse in that context. Corporate espionage is certainly not as bad as the mass murder of little girls, so people are willing to buy it since it doesn’t matter as much.