They might not produce anything, but on the flip side they also are the only ones on that list that have to be prepared to increase data storage by hundreds of hours per minute! And that doesn’t include multiple copies for different quality etc.

Honestly YouTube is probably one of the few companies that deserves to be able to raise their prices unless they start deleting old content en masse so they don’t have to infinitely scale.

That being said, I wouldn’t pay $14. It’s just taking advantage of matching all the other streaming services raising their prices, something being done purely out of greed in the name of profits. Everything is overpriced now, I hate this.

In theory, yes it’s impossible. You may have laws and licensing but it may be difficult to prove anything. However, there may also be technical things you can do to prevent certain usage. For example, an attack called GLAZE (https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/) can make image styles harder to mimic for many common text-to-image models. Nothing is foolproof though and new models can make this obsolete

A couple executive-types gathered the more senior developers for an “open” discussion about recruitment and retention. They suggest multiple ideas that would destroy morale (like non-compete clauses, poorly designed work-role pipelines, etc), and all of us suggest against them, and provided alternatives instead (like a shift in direction of certain efforts, more autonomy and less micromanaging, etc). They end up accusing us of not supporting our company’s mission and tell us that if we don’t agree then they don’t want us there and we should just quit. I think after that meeting, only 2 people stayed out of about 30, and hiring numbers have significantly declined.