AI: People Are Becoming Lars Ulrich?

There are a lot of takes about AI out there on the internets, some good, some bad. Okay, actually, a lot bad. There’s talks of the environmental impact, which I personally feel can’t be spoken about fully, until we acknowledge the environmental impact that we, and our habits, have already contributed to environmental breakdown (fossil fuels, media consumption, consumerism). And then, there’s talks of copyright, and LLM training, which … for some reason, is continually popping people into kernels of a Lars Ulrich meme from 2000. In discussions about LLM training, to many, it’s either theft, or it’s learning. Learning, in the way that a person might learn if they take art classes, or study art, or what-have-you. Wherein they learn about other artists, they learn from their works. Some people even adapt styles from others in order to incorporate said styles into their eventual own works. And, in some cases, you can compare this to how LLMs are trained. Human beings learn by studying the…