I swear to god people like Jacob only exist as part of the AI hype cycle. They're here to tell us how dangerous it is, and yet how utopian it will be, and yet it'll kill us all if we aren't careful, and yet it's inevitable! We hear the same rhetoric from the AI companies themselves, as if they want to depict AI as some phenomenon that is self-perpetuating to the point of being completely out of anyone's control.

The sad truth is that all of the "leaps and bounds" that AI have made in the last few years have very little to do with our understanding of computer science, and everything to do with just how brazenly big tech corporations are acting by ignoring intellectual property, scraping every piece of data that they can get their hands on, and using it all to train their AI. It is the silicon valley social media company textbook behavior of "move fast and break things", and they have proven (both in their actions and in actual courtrooms) that they are perfectly happy to bend and break the law in hopes of disrupting the market.

The entire generative AI industry would disappear in an instant if the courts explicitly forbid them from exploiting everybody's labor, and we all (be it you and me, the judges, or the AI companies themselves) know it.