I can understand that take, but to me the more relevant comparison is the fossil fuel boom.

Like the advent of more powerful creative tools (camera, printing press, etc.), fossil fuels allowed us to do what we were already doing but faster.

Unlike a camera, though… Coal, oil, and gen AI all have to pull raw material from somewhere in order to operate, and produce undesired byproducts as a result of their operation.

In the early days of fossil fuel, it must been impossible to even conceive the thought that there might be limits to how much we could safely extract raw materials or dump hazardous residual crud.

From one person’s perspective, the world seems so impossibly large. But it turns out, there are limits, and we were already well on our way to exceeding them by the time we realized our predicament.

I think we’re sprinting towards discovering similar constraints for our information systems.

It won’t be exactly the same, and much like climate change I don’t think there will be a specific minute of a specific day where everything turns to shit.

But I think there are instructive similarities:

• The most harmful kinds of gen AI, as with fossil fuels, will have the highest ROI.
• There will be safe, responsible ways to use it, but it will be difficult to regulate from the top down and full of perverse incentives to cheat from the bottom up.
• It will probably continue to accelerate even as the problems become more noticeable and disruptive.
• It will be next to impossible to undo the damage at a significant scale.

Edit: Yeah, I’m also not too sympathetic to the death of copyright. It’s long overdue. The original conception of copyright was botched from the start – more about capital and censorship than about anything for the good of all humanity. But still, there are two good things that I see about copyright that I worry about losing in a “post-plagiarism future”:

1. Accurate attribution

I like knowing where an idea came from, whether it’s an artistic concept or formal information. It’s nice to know where I should go to continue the conversation and see more thoughts that came from a similar source.

2. Faithful replication

I think it’s important that ideas keep their same general shape when they’re copied around, at least when the copier isn’t deliberately intending to modify them. Things like satire can easily be mistaken for earnest content if you tilt your head 5 degrees to the side. I don’t want the discrete bits and bobs of that kind of content to get sucked up and recycled to make arguments for the very thing the original author was arguing against.

Edit 2: I remembered there’s a Google Tech Talk from ages ago, where the speaker argues copyright is unnecessary to preserve these two attributes in the digital age, because search engines are so reliable that you’ll never be confused about the origin of a work, and computers only make exact copies of things so there’s no risk of degrading a work over time. I think those arguments have not aged well, lol.