Do we normally consider recorded music to be theft from musicians who would have been paid to play music live if we never allowed (or invented) recorded music?

Normally this isn't the case for any technology except for the time it first comes around. AI is only different to use for two reasons. First, it is in our time. Second, it seems to be faster than any of the options before, so the shock is harder.

But in general, this is a website of people writing code. How many on here study how a person solves a problem and then trains the ultimate chimpanzee to do (at least part of) their job? Is building computer programs that automate what others did manually theft?

Consider the origin of the word "computer" itself, a mass theft of jobs that would have employed the whole world many many times over.

▲

max__dev 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Musicians are paid to record music. If they were not, as is the case for ai data, we would indeed consider it theft.

▲

Windchaser 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Musicians are paid to record music. If they were not, as is the case for ai data, we would indeed consider it theft.

I remember reading literature from the 1930s, and there were quite a few folks who thought that the musicians-doing-recordings were stealing from the old-timers who played for live audiences.

History does not exactly repeat itself, but it rhymes

▲

SkyBelow 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The few who get paid to record are replacing far more who would have otherwise been paid to play if that was the only way to listen to any music. Is it okay if one musician replaces another but not if a non-musician does so? The person getting replaced didn't get paid either way.

Going back to the previous example, say I pay a different coworker $50 for the data to train the chimpanzee and then use it to replace the first person. In either case they lost their jobs while receiving nothing for it. In either case, what happened to them is the same, so how would they be stolen from in one case and not in another?

	▲	max__dev an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Whether it is okay or not has no bearing on it being theft. And no need to create a hypothetical, this is exactly what happened to musicians. There is broad evidence that labs have used substantial amounts of pirated data, no need to reach for a new definition of theft.