For me, the change from optimism to cynicism happened when I realized the value of tech companies came primarily from being able to find new rules exploits. Not from any of the actual, y'know, technology. Like, sure, Apple invented the iPhone, but Uber found a way to turn your iPhone into a legal weapon aimed directly at your city's local taxi licensing scheme.

That's also why Apple is so worried about their App Store revenue above all else. The legal argument they make is that the 30% take is an IP licensing scheme, but the value of IP is Soviet central planning nonsense. Certainly, if the App Store was just there to take 30% from games, Apple wouldn't be defending it this fiercely[0], and they wouldn't have burned goodwill trying to impose the 30% on Patreon.

Likewise, the value of generative AI is not that the AI is going to give us post-scarcity mental labor or even that AI will augment human productivity. The former isn't happening and the latter is dwarfed by the fact that AI is a rules exploit to access a bunch of copyrighted information that would have otherwise cost lots of money. In that environment, it is unethical to evaluate the technology solely on its own merits. My opinion of your model and your thinly-veiled """research""" efforts will depend heavily on what the model is trained for and on, because that's the only intelligent way to evaluate such a thing.

Did you train on public domain or compensated and consensually provided data? Good for you.

Did you train an art generator on a bunch of artists' deviantART or Dribbble pages? Fuck off, slopmonger.

Did you train on a bunch of Elsevier journals? You know what? Fuck them, they deserve it, now please give me the weights for free.

Humans can smell exploitation a mile away, and the people shitting on AI are doing so because they smell the exploitation.

[0] As a company, Apple has always been mildly hostile to videogames. Like, strictly speaking, operating a videogame platform requires special attention to backwards compatibility that only Microsoft and console vendors have traditionally been willing to offer. The API stability guarantees Apple and Google provide - i.e. "we don't change things for dumb reasons, but when we do change them we expect you to move within X years" are not acceptable to anything other than perpetually updated live service games. The one-and-done model of most videogames is not economically compatible with the moving target that is Apple platforms.