What, I shouldn't be able to visit a website if I'm too efficient and fast at visiting it? I shouldn't be able to buy tickets to an event or preorder a device if I'm faster than the person next to me?
I don't think AI should be banned, but I don't find the "it's just more efficient" argument particularly compelling because there are a ton of examples in the real world of us banning (either legally, socially, or technologically) automation purely because that automation is more efficient than a human being; everything from automated website access, to game botting, to pre-ordering, to anti-spam measures on commenting platforms. Efficiency/scalability compared to basic human ability is a very common metric for us to use to determine whether a technology is "good" or "bad".
Even game bots, where humans and robots compete head to head directly, should be able to be managed with a ladder system where the bots (representing skills of the self-force-multiplying humans behind them) end up at some level individual humans can't attain, so plain humans are left battling each other while automation humans' proxies battle in their own echelon.
This would clarify a few things, such as, why a automator's hourly rate probably should be much higher than a piecework toil rate.
But I also recognize that both of those positions are extreme minority opinions.
There are lots of things we do that could be handled differently, but unfortunately the current structures we've built in society don't handle them differently. Automation is one of those areas. We don't really have a good way of handling automated attacks without targeting automation, even though there arguably are ways we could do so. And for the average person on the street and for the average person on HN, efficiency is an extremely good argument for regulating access.
And while I lean in the opposite direction, I also understand and sympathize with the practical realities that lead people to that opinion. It's all well and good for me to tell people to get rid of captchas, but I don't have a similarly simple system to hand them today that will help prevent automated attacks.
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I'll add onto that point that when we talk about efficiency of botting, scraping, scalping, etc... nobody says, "tough luck, get with the times." The arguments against captchas and human tests and invasive software argue that we can address the problems without that invasive stuff. Nobody argues that the problems don't exist.
So that's another difference I see with concerns around AI training on copyrighted material. Nobody responds to public ladders in a video game being swarmed with bots by shrugging, they try to offer solutions. In contrast, people do respond to concerns about AI flooding public galleries and overwhelming moderators or cloning existing artists by shrugging and saying it's not a problem. That feels a little inconsistent to me.
