It’s the exact opposite! It privatizes skill. Instead of people learning skills themselves, those skills are owned by the AI company and need to be purchased for continued use and can be taken away with the press of a button.

But if I learn a skill, no one can take that away from me.

Whenever big tech says they’re “democratizing” something. Replace the word with monetizing.

They reinvent things but with tech to enable them to rent seek. When challenged on it they wave around the tech and wait for the mesmerized crowd applause.

It empowers fakers and crooks far more than it does anyone else. For the common people to gain power, it was necessary for the nobility to lose theirs. If already advantaged people (in this case by being unburdened by a conscience) gain the most power, that represents a net loss of power for most people.

Plutocratizing just doesn’t sound as marketable

The way the speak of democratizing skill reminds me of how in the short story “Harrison Bergeron” they made us read of school.

Essentially to make everyone equal they have to handicap others who are smarter.

In our world we are moving towards that unintentionally. In order to make everyone equal that means the access and use of all said tools must be equal too.

In our world we are slowly dismantling all systems of production to replace it with llms. In the future the epstine class wants for us no one will have access to Photoshop or Godot they will only have ai terminal to interact with. Everyone’s equal now and has equal access to approved information, and equal access to said tools. Yet there is no opritunity for thought, intelligence, creativity outside of said tool. You are capped by what information you are presented and what capabilities the tool allows you to have. People who have the capacity to think outside the box are now restrained by an artificial barrier with no real outlet.

Sure in reality there’s always going to be a separate carve out on the internet where people will still access non-ai tools. But we are those people lol, and I wouldn’t say the fediverse is nessisarly thriving. There’s something like .01% of google search users ever hit page 2 on search results, people are just going to use what ever ai tool or popular service is trending.

I don’t get it either. If you don’t have the skill to do something you can always pay someone. That doesn’t make you the one with the skill though. If they did it for free then you still aren’t the one doing the thing. You’re just an ideas person. That’s not a bad thing but it usually is the easy part of any creative endeavor.

The one downvote is from fElon Musk.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said

We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.

I don’t see how anybody could see this and think it’s democratizing something. It gives the rich a way to reduce their dependency on the skilled worker, shifting power away from the people with skill to the people with money.

There used to be a promise that if you worked hard and studied diligently, you yourself might be able to capture some of that wealth. Now this option is slowly disappearing.

skills have always been democratized. just practice, get books from the library, now you can watch tutorials on youtube! ai capitalizes skills for corporations.

“Democratizing skill” in online video games is cheating: Letting some program do the work for you.

“It democratizes coding” in the same way an Easy Bake Oven democratizes cooking.

“It democratizes drawing” in the same way a plotter democratizes making lines.

“It democratizes music creation”… Uh, this one was already cooked a long time ago. AI changes almost nothing in this area.

People have been listening to (electronic) automated/generated music since the 1960s. Technically, every time we “listen to music” we’re hearing a machine-generated version (since the artists aren’t performing there in the room with us).

Also, pop music is so formulaic it didn’t surprise me in the slightest the first time I tried an (open source) AI music generation model on my PC (local GPU) and it made a catchy tune almost immediately. I was expecting total shit I could laugh at and share with my friends but it spat out perfectly respectable tracks about 10% of the time (and it only takes like 10 seconds to generate a song) 🤷

It’s not even strictly an ai thing, they were tossing that word around during the low-code/no-code fad too, and given those tools all required expensive licenses I had the same opinion about it then as you do now.

I have an AKAI MPC. Industry standard music production shit. It uses AI to reverse engineer copyrighted music. It can generate beats. Some of your favorite music was made using placeholder beats. I can give you examples from most industries. I’m telling yall, you’re barking up the wrong damned tree.

I compare it to citizen united, or pay to win, where money can boost your participation. And if you believe that citizen united is a good thing, you value democratization of skill

Just leaving this here…

https://gizmodo.com/the-tech-bros-are-putting-swords-on-robots-and-democratizing-mma-2000823619