UGC x UBI = maybe we can improve society, somewhat?

While reading this Ars Technica Article it occurred to me that all the training data us rubes are making for LLMs to consume should result in compensation for our effort. Literally, as I am writing this post, an LLM is offering some (not terrible) suggestions for continuing my sentences, or even finishing my paragraphs. Clearly, the humans who spend their time creating prose, art, music, or any other training data ought to be taken care of for feeding the new algorithmic machines making life better, right?

let’s assume we need user generated content

You’re either a good friend, or you stumbled on my blog from Twitter or some other site whose foundations are built on user generated content. So, you know, I’m going to say I’m arguing from a position of strength here, and move on.

“the blockchain solves this” (no)

If at any point you thought “the blockchain solves this” please sit down. It’s impractical, nonsensical. Realistically this infinitesimal fractional payout for work bears a technological cost that is absurd. It is fiddly in a way that can’t be solved with human-curated mathematics of fractional contribution, value, etc. Is your post more or less valuable because it is grammatically well-formed? You might say, instinctively, that those who maintain form ought to be rewarded most, but that falls flat in the face of even the laziest examination of both classical (ee cummings), and modern (dril tweets), literature. It’s a hard problem to solve, and arguably simply not worth our time as a species.

my (next) argument for UBI

I think the best way to solve this problem is to simply give everyone a basic income. This is a very old idea, and has been tried in many places. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a good one.

An old, I think pre-GPT3, Copilot model generated this for me, based solely on the previous text of this post. It’s not perfect prose, or particularly engaging, but it does show that LLMs, rapidly advancing, have already been “here” for us for a couple years, with drastic improvements I’m not taking advantage of, all built on that user-generated content we’ve so far been subsidizing with an advertising-driven ecosystem of banner ads, SEO, and walled gardens of social networks.

As an aside, the model is right. UBI appears to be a net benefit to society. It increases output and provides opportunities and benefits for society overall.

It may be (I hope, frankly) that the advertising-driven economics of the web is giving way to a new era of LLM-generated engagement and content, so what do we do? General, true, artificial intelligence (i.e. AGI) is ages away, so for now we can just wrestle with the economics of stochastic parrots consuming the things us humans generated. We want to value the things humans create, perhaps more than ever, to prevent a cycle of models trained on increasingly distilled output from other models, a disastrous course of information distillation that is no more than a homeopathic oblivion of value.

f it, pay people to post

Really. That’s it. Forget all the other benefits of UBI. Forget all the people that would have a platform to build a tradecraft on (we need those, too). Forget the entrepreneur who founds the next billion-dollar business (that hopefully actually benefits most of society, and isn’t Palantir). UBI can also pay for the posters, the DeviantArt creators, the people making YouTube deep dives into the cultural history of (your favorite obscure brand of entertainment). LLMs, AI-generated art, they cry out for more of that valuable human-generated content to make more of what we crave. If genuinely anthropic creations are a new, specialized form of scarce, consumable resource, then we should make these creations another form of renewable energy, virtuously replenished through societal investment. Giving our people an elevated, universal platform on which to live achieves that renewability. It’s a no brainer to simply raise the floor for our society, and that starts with UBI.