Yet we live in a world where people will profit from the work and creativity of others without paying any of it back to the creator. Creating something is work, and we don’t live in a post-scarcity communist utopia. The issue is the “little guy” always getting fucked over in a system that’s pay-to-play.
Donating effort to the greater good of society is commendable, but people also deserve to be compensated for their work. Devaluing the labor of small creators is scummy.
I’m working on a tabletop setting inspired by the media I consumed. If I choose to sell it, I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay royalties to the publishers of every piece of media that inspired me.
If you were a robot that never needed to eat or sleep and could generate 10,000 tabletop RPGs an hour with little to no creative input then I might be worried about whether or not those media creators were compensated.
The efficiency something can be created with should have no bearing on whether someone gets paid royalties.
When, not if, such a robot exists, do you imagine we’ll pay everyone who’d ever published a roleplaying game? Like a basic income exclusively for people who did art before The Training?
Or should the people who want things that couldn’t exist without magic content engines be denied, to protect some prior business model? Bear in mind this is the literal Luddite position. Weavers smashed looms. Centuries later, how much fabric in your life do you take for granted, thanks to that machinery?
‘We have to stop this labor-saving technology because of capitalism’ is a boneheaded way to deal with any conflict between labor-saving technology… and capitalism.
Those 10000 tabletop RPGs will almost certainly be completely worthless on their own, but might contain some novel ideas. Until a human comes by and scours it for ideas and combines it. It could very well be that in the same time it could only create 1 coherent tabletop RPG idea.
Should be mentioned though, AIs don’t run for free either, they cost quite a lot of electricity and require expensive hardware.