I think that, in the history of the world since guns have been invented, they have mostly been used to the advantage of the powerful, not the powerless.

You could indeed argue that. I think that just enforced the argument that the means do not have a moral aspect, and it is the instances where they are used that causes the goodness or badness of the event. How they are used comes from decisions.

You could also steal something and your life might be better for having a thing, possibly more so than how much worse it makes for the person you took it from.

The thing that distinguishes theft from taxation is a societal convention. Adding consensus around how, what, and why things are taken makes it more consentual. Individuals may disagree with having to pay tax, but as a society it is generally agreed upon (even if the methods of agreeing a flawed)

Things need to be an extreme case for guns to come into that process. It implicitly means the goal of reaching consensus has failed and one group is enforcing their will upon the other. That's usually not a good path for the disadvantaged because the powerful by definition have more capacity to enforce their will. Reaching consensus, whilst slower, is the one that supports the disadvantaged better.

yep - guns are a guarantee of liberty.

Damn can't believe Samuel Colt is on HN

> Guns makes lives better if you are the disadvantaged and is at the receiving end of the abuse by the powerful.

...only if you have the gun, you know. Which the disadvantaged people tend not to. In fact, let's generalize your statement a bit: "Tools of power and coercion make lives better if you are the disadvantaged and is at the receiving end of the abuse by the powerful". No, they don't! They do the opposite for very obvious reasons.

>“What about guns and bombs” is not a counter-argument that matters much, because you have to consider context. We can get into the weeds: guns and other weapons were used by various liberation movements to free the world from fascism and other forms of tyranny, and also to kill feral hogs attacking humans.

Neither of those contexts argue that they are not inventions. You may argue about their net contribution to society, but you can also do that with AI.

> The only real use for AI novel generation is if you’re stuck on a desert island with nothing else to read.

I find this a strange but common occurrence, an incredible lack of imagination amongst those who seem to claim that imagination is what AI is taking from the world. Is it this scarcity that makes it seem so valuable? If you have an Idea and AI has an idea, you have two ideas, one is not taken from the other. I suspect if I asked a current AI for uses for AI novel generation, it would give me a rather poor list, but it would be a list nonetheless. The quality would be poor because the models are not yet very advanced, not fundamentally because they are AI. I expect it would provide different to the uses I could think up, even if there was overlap, I would not feel like it has taken anything from me. It would have created the same idea that we share.

As others have said I took this to mean generative AI as this is the convention used, and by context was clear here (precisely because AGI has not been claimed by most providers)

>You likely are referring to plagiarism slurry

The option that this generative AI is plagiarism is not supported by the law, not the majority of public opinion. There are many, probably a majority, who wish there to be a form of compensation for having their works trained upon. Quite a large number believe that consent should be required. From what I have experienced, only a few consider this to rise to the level of plagiarism.

To pass off a work as wholly your own would require claiming no generative AI use. While this is done occasionally. Few instances of AI use declare that it has not been used.

There is a mistaking of nomenclature here, but it may be purposeful by the tech oligarchs. Artificial general intelligence is usually abbreviated "AGI". The "GenAI" shorthand is usually meaning "generative AI", but it may have been coined intentionally as a nod to supposed future general intelligence built on the same technology.

generative, not general

I can disagree with "direct attack on human dignity" while agreeing with "art is about communication".

> so the art it creates lacks that magic of a shared human connection.

I keep hearing this point, and the thought that comes up first is 'but blood diamonds'. Let me explain, you can buy a cheaper 'inauthentic' lab-grown gem that's chemically/physically identical to a (nearly hypothetical) flawless diamond, but we buy the 'natural, and imperfect' diamonds at a much higher price. The blood of the orphans that pulled the diamond rough from the minds soaked into the diamond raising it's value. The value isn't the blood, but the effort it took to produce that diamond, the story of how hard it was to mine is the value, not the end product (a shiny rock), which in the end, is all anyone can see.

The second thought I had was that what people find meaningful, beautiful, important varies wildly, to the point that landscapes are meaningful. Meaning can be found in anything, regardless of the existence of intent.

The third thought I had is communication does not survive the translation of art unscathed or unchanged. There is this disconnect, between the artist and the viewer. The viewer only ever sees a finished product. The viewer extracts meaning from the work entirely without the author/artist's involvement. This isn't communication, this is a soliloquy, frozen in time, the artist can not expand, explain, or sharpen (except in another works) those ideas once released into the world.

This disconnect is the rub. There are no 'magic' pixels that dictate secret meaning. There is no 'human color' that indicates intent. Meaning itself can't be painted. What relationship can ever take place between artist and viewer through those works alone. It's a 1-way conversation. And considering my second though, that intent isn't even needed to extract meaning, you can see the apathy and rise of the use of AI in art.

The point of making art isn't to make money, or to impress other people, or even change other people's thinking. It's to express yourself. That can't be taken by AI.

The point of viewing art is to reflect on how you perceive it. That's true regardless of the artist/author, and regardless of the blood (effort) (or not {AI}) used to craft it.

Well, Duchamp's fountain is a great illustration that "art is fundamentally about communication." does not entail that a cultural/artistic artifact has to be created by the author at all. I as well can create a short story with help of an LLM and say - this is my vision and what I always wanted to say.

> AI might be able to produce pretty images and sounds, but it has no experience or feelings so the art it creates lacks that magic of a shared human connection.

Who cares? I want it to do my taxes for me, it doesn't need to be Picasso

The person you're responding to isn't talking about automation or jobs, they're talking about creating being fundamental to the human experience. And they're 100% correct. Humans have been creating since ancient times; the earliest cave painting discovered is 67,800 years old [1]! By comparison, how old is modern capitalism?

Work and art have existed long before emperors, kings, feudal lords, and capitalists and they'll exist long after them. Any economic or political system that misuses technology to disrupt the ancient human need to create is fundamentally anti-human. The biggest fault with our current socioeconomic system is it prioritizes the worst aspects of humanity (greed, hoarding, consumption) over the best aspects (building and creating). That's why people are upset.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/world/asia/indonesia-hand...

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> Programmers are not special. Artists are not special. Humans are not special.

Really winning me over with this take. Definitely prefer this vs checks notes human experience, creativity, and dignity.

What the comment is doing is assuming no good use for absolutely anybody. That is patently wrong.

No it doesn't[1], except perhaps by turning a bunch of thoughful humans into an online mob. Social media amplifies humanity's worst impulses for clicks. The connection part is purely incidental and is going away now that AI can just generate whatever 30s conspiracy theory video you want to watch instead of having a person do it.

Why do people listen to new music when there is so much music already?

Perhaps they just enjoy it. Do you reject a beautiful sunset because it was not human generated, or because there have been trillions of sunsets before?

Because generation for the specific tastes I have when I’m in a specific mood is easier than search for a match. I listen to human-generated music too.

Because its exactly what I want sometimes.

Bands make albums with 1 or 2 good songs. AI can crank out an endless supply of what I want to hear.

I like both.

Haha, well I can answer about the bait thing. I’ve said it for years now, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41211421

So at least I’ve got my story straight for that period. As for the neurological condition, I’m not diagnosed with anything neurological. This machine functions fine as far as the doctors are concerned :)