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L. Rhodes

The big problem that the current trend in "AI" is meant to solve is that of too much opportunity. The web opened up all sorts of creative spaces and jobs to anyone who could navigate the technology. But it's hard to build an effective elite when the same opportunities are available to everyone. You have to counteract that leveling effect by redirecting all of that creative power to a relatively small pool of comparatively privileged people capable of functioning as a virtual aristocracy.

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L. Rhodes

Aristocracy is not a bad model for thinking about generative AI. If you think of websites as a form of virtual real estate, then the function of, say, LLM-powered search is to shift the value of other people's labor to the internet's biggest landholders. You pour your hard-won knowledge and creativity into your little digital plot of land, and an AI bot comes along to collect your harvest so that Google sell ads when they take it to market as their own. Somehow you work for them now.

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