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