#creative-labor

#creative-labor

By the early 1900s, player pianos had evolved to more fully reproduce a human performance, including subtle dynamics like tempo changes and the introduction of a damper pedal. The human role went from deskilled to fully deprecated as electric motors replaced foot-powered bellows. With the Seeburg Lilliputian Model L, the only job left for humans who wanted to play the piano in the 1920s was to put in a coin.

In 2016, the legendary Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki was shown a bizarre AI-generated video of a misshapen human body crawling across a floor. Miyazaki declared himself "utterly disgusted" by the technology demo, which he considered an "insult to life itself." "If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it," Miyazaki said. "I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all."

OpenAI's new Sora 2 can generate movie-quality video from a text prompt. It's a remarkable technological leap and a breathtaking moral one. Reports across Hollywood show that Sora has been trained on massive libraries of film, television and visual media. Those works were created, financed and protected under copyright law. None were offered up as free fuel for an algorithm that now threatens to replace the people who made them.