An anecdote:
Many years ago I travelled from France to London and I witnessed some of the groundworks for the future high-speed rails on both sides of the channel. On a weekend day, so no actual work was going on.
On the French side the groundworks were almost finished. It was just a wide smooth expanse of gravel that went on and on. The transition from where the gravel was compacted + graded to where it still needed work was a clear line. The site fencing was continuous and intact everywhere. The large machines were neatly parked together in separately fenced off areas, near that transition line between finished/to do.
In England the works looked not even close to finished. The gravel looked like they had been making a BMX track for jeeps, several very bumpy narrow paths next to each other, with ridges in between, without any section of the trajectory looking finished. It looked like they were working everywhere at the same time. Fencing was a jumbled mess. The many more + much smaller machines were haphazardly parked around the gravel (weekend). Parked on one of the hills of the BMX track there was the tiniest bulldozer that I have ever seen on a construction site that wasn’t a renovation project, for such a massive project its prominent presence was hilarious imo.
With how the English worked on their part of the project, it was inevitable that they would be over budget, over time, and deliver with worse quality (with higher future costs for the client as a consequence).
The best succinct description of llm that I’ve read was “plagiarism machine”, because that’s basically what they are: automated plagiarism. At best they create a collage of other works, at worst they copy one work verbatim, but they never create something original because they can’t.
Copying something is a lot easier and thus cheaper than creating an original work from scratch, so genuine creators cannot hope to compete on cost. Which leads to less people being able to afford to earn a living from creating works, which leads to less original works being created.
Short term that’s great for the neoliberal company executives: fire the expensive artists, create cheap slop with the plagiarism machine, and thus maximize profits now. That the plagiarism machine becomes stagnant because not enough new original works are being created is a future problem, by which time the current executives will have already jumped ship.
But while it’s great for the neoliberal business model, for the rest of society it will suck. So now that we have confirmation that the AI executives know how bad their products are, and that they were just publicly lying about it in the style of tobacco executives, will anything be done about this “astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions”? Personally I doubt it, there’s too much regulatory capture.