alt Hacker News> “To put me to work that way, without remittance, is a form of slave labor,” said Wolff, professor emeritus of English and winner of the National Medal of Arts. “They’re using my work without paying for it. As time goes on, they’re going to make the lives of writers very difficult if there’s no fruit to their labor.”
This is obviously hyperbolic, but it was a very poor choice of words.
It also relies on an assumption - that AI will become a substitute for buying books - that I think is likely untrue. You’ve been able to easily gain a surface-level understanding of anything for free online for decades, and for that matter, you’ve been able to easily pirate any book for decades! Hasn’t stopped people from buying books, or going to college, or doing any number of other expensive things that are technically unnecessary if the goal is just to gain information.
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It's a strange kind of conceptualization of slavery that extracts zero work from the victim.
While I also agree that AI will probably not replace books, I think we can't deny that the AI companies are positioning AI as being able to replace books. Part of what makes pirating pirating is that you're trying to siphon the original revenue stream for yourself. Whether or not you're successful is one thing, but I do think that is Anthropic's intention.
They didn't, like, steal the books for ideological reasons or anything. They stole the books so they could then generate equivalents, so people will pay them instead of buy the original books. That's the entire value proposition of AI.