> We are truly in the Information Age now, and I suspect a similar thing will play out for the digital realm.
The analogy seems to be backwards though. It would be as if we previously had a scarcity of land and because of that divided it up into private property so markets could maximize crop yield etc. and then someone came up with a way to grow food on asteroids using robots, and that food is only at the 20th percentile of quality but it's far cheaper. Suddenly food becomes much more abundant and the people who had been selling the 20th percentile food for $5 are completely out of the market because the new thing can do that for $0.05, and the people providing the 50th percentile food for $10 are also taking a hit because the price difference between what they're providing and the 20th percentile stuff just doubled.
The existing plantation owners then want to put a stop to this somehow, or find a way to tax it, but arguments like this have a problem:
> Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article?
This was already the status quo as a result of the internet. Newspapers were slowly dying for 20 years before there was ever a ChatGPT, because they had been predicated on the scarcity of printing presses. If you published a story in 1975 it would take 24 hours for relevant competitors to have it in their printed publication and in the meantime it was your exclusive. The customer who wants it today gets it from you. On top of that, there weren't that many competitors covering local news, because how many local outlets are there with a printing press?
Then blogs, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter come and anyone who can set up WordPress can report the news five minutes after you do -- or five hours before, because now everyone has an internet-connected camera in their pocket so the first news of something happening now comes in seconds from whoever happened to be there at the time instead of the next morning after a media company sent a reporter there to cover it.
The biggest problem we have yet to solve from this is how to trust reports from randos. The local paper had a reputation to uphold that you now can't rely on when the first reports are expected to come from people with no previous history of reporting because it's just whoever was there. But that's the same thing AI can't do either -- it's a notorious confabulist.
And it's the media outlets shooting themselves in the foot with this one, because too many of them have gotten far too sloppy in the race to be first or pander to partisans that they're eroding the one advantage they would have been able to keep. Damn fools to erode the public's trust in their ability to get the facts right when it's the one thing people would otherwise still have to get from them in particular.
This assumes the limiting factor is content generation, not ability to read and verify.
You make the point later in your comment, but consider it a minor issue. “Randos”
the actual limits are verification, and then attention. Verification is always more expensive than generation.
However, people are happy to consume unverified content which suits their needs. This is why you always needed to subsidize newspapers with ads or classifieds.
> This assumes the limiting factor is content generation, not ability to read and verify.
Content generation is the thing copyright applies to. If you want to create a reward system for verification, it's not going to look anything like that.
It mostly looks like things we already have, like laws against pretending you're someone else to trade on their reputation so that people can build a reputation as trustworthy and make money from subscriptions or ads by being the one people to turn to when they want trustworthy information.
> However, people are happy to consume unverified content which suits their needs. This is why you always needed to subsidize newspapers with ads or classifieds.
I suspect the real problem here is the voting thing. When people derive significant value from information they're quite willing to pay for it. Wall St. pays a lot of money for Bloomberg terminals, companies pay to do R&D or market research, individuals often pay for financial software or games and entertainment content etc.
But voting is a collective action problem. Your vote isn't very likely to change the outcome so are you personally going to spend a lot of money to make sure it's informed? For most people the answer is going to be no, so we need something that gives them access to high quality information at minimal cost if we want them to be informed.
Annoyingly one of the common methods of mitigating collective action problems (government funding) has a huge perverse incentive here because the primary thing we want people to be informed about is political issues and official misconduct, so you can't give the incumbent politicians the purse strings for the same reason the First Amendment proscribes them from governing speech.
So you need a way to fund quality reporting the public can access for free. Advertising kind of fit but it never really aligned the incentives. You can often get more views by being entertaining or inflammatory than factual.
The question is basically, who can you get to supply money to fund factual reporting for everyone, whose interest is for it to be accurate rather than biased in favor of the funder's interests? Or, if that's not a thing, whose interests are fairly aligned with those of the general public? Because with that you can use a patronage model, i.e. the content is free to everyone but patrons choose to pay money because they want the work to be done more than they want to not pay.
The obvious answer for "who" is then "the middle class" because they're not so poor they can't pay a few bucks while still consisting of a large diverse group that won't collectively refuse to fund many classes of important reporting. But then we need two things. The first is for the middle class to not get hollowed out, which we're not doing a great job with right now.
And the second is to have a cultural norm where doing this is a thing, i.e. stop teaching people illiterate false dichotomy nonsense where the only two economic camps are "Soviet Communism" in which the government is required to solve everything through central planning and "greed is good" where being altruistic makes you a doofus for not spending all your money on blackjack and cocaine. People rather need to be encouraged to notice that once their basic needs are met, wanting to live in a better world is just as valid a use for free time and disposable income as designer shoes or golf.
The analogy seems to be backwards though. It would be as if we previously had a scarcity of land and because of that divided it up into private property so markets could maximize crop yield etc. and then someone came up with a way to grow food on asteroids using robots, and that food is only at the 20th percentile of quality but it's far cheaper. Suddenly food becomes much more abundant and the people who had been selling the 20th percentile food for $5 are completely out of the market because the new thing can do that for $0.05, and the people providing the 50th percentile food for $10 are also taking a hit because the price difference between what they're providing and the 20th percentile stuff just doubled.
The existing plantation owners then want to put a stop to this somehow, or find a way to tax it, but arguments like this have a problem:
> Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article?
This was already the status quo as a result of the internet. Newspapers were slowly dying for 20 years before there was ever a ChatGPT, because they had been predicated on the scarcity of printing presses. If you published a story in 1975 it would take 24 hours for relevant competitors to have it in their printed publication and in the meantime it was your exclusive. The customer who wants it today gets it from you. On top of that, there weren't that many competitors covering local news, because how many local outlets are there with a printing press?
Then blogs, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter come and anyone who can set up WordPress can report the news five minutes after you do -- or five hours before, because now everyone has an internet-connected camera in their pocket so the first news of something happening now comes in seconds from whoever happened to be there at the time instead of the next morning after a media company sent a reporter there to cover it.
The biggest problem we have yet to solve from this is how to trust reports from randos. The local paper had a reputation to uphold that you now can't rely on when the first reports are expected to come from people with no previous history of reporting because it's just whoever was there. But that's the same thing AI can't do either -- it's a notorious confabulist.
And it's the media outlets shooting themselves in the foot with this one, because too many of them have gotten far too sloppy in the race to be first or pander to partisans that they're eroding the one advantage they would have been able to keep. Damn fools to erode the public's trust in their ability to get the facts right when it's the one thing people would otherwise still have to get from them in particular.