I think the question of fair use is separate from the question of piracy, and probably separate from the question of intellectual property in general. Even if we were to protect fair use, that doesn’t make it legal to wholesale copy books. Individual piracy from people who can’t really afford it is one thing and largely harmless, even a net good. I know people who only started reading books from particular authors because they pirated one copy and bought others. That’s very different from a company downloading entire libraries of books without paying. Shifting the question from piracy to fair use is just another way of making you think of the wrong question.

I’d like to live in a world that doesn’t gatekeep property. But we live in a world where artists aren’t paid for their work directly, and in that world intellectual property is necessary.

Have you heard the stuff from the new v4 model? The vocals are so much clearer and the instrumentation gets pretty varied (ymmv depending on how specific you get with the styles though)

Petty theft rings too true. Had a friend that worked at one of those bulk ingredient shops who’d regularly just take home like a kilo of rice or flour. They don’t check anyway and it hardly affects their bottom line.

You should give Claude Code a shot if you have a Claude subscription. I’d say this is where AI actually does a decent job: picking up human slack, under supervision, not replacing humans at anything. AI tools won’t suddenly be productive enough to employ, but I as a professional can use it to accelerate my own workflow. It’s actually where the risk of them taking jobs is real: for example, instead of 10 support people you can have 2 who just supervise the responses of an AI.

But of course, the Devil’s in the detail. The only reason this is cost effective is because of VC money subsidizing and hiding the real cost of running these models.

I don’t mind a whoops somebody fucked right up error message if you let me click a button for more details. Or at the very least, give me a reference number I can tell somebody about. Some “software companies” don’t even properly log things on their end so nobody can solve shit.