Following the "GNU-flavour hacker ethos" as described, one concludes that it is right for OpenAI to copy data without restriction, it is wrong for NYT to restrict others from using their data, and it is also wrong for OpenAI to restrict the sharing of their model weights or outputs for training.

Luckily, most people seem to ignore OpenAI's hypocritical TOS against sharing their output weights for training. I would go one step further and say that they should share the weights completely, but I understand there's practical issues with that.

Luckily, we can kind of "exfiltrate" the weights by training on their output. Or wait for someone to leak it, like NovelAI did.

I won't necessarily argue against that moral view, but in this case it is two large corporations fighting. One has the power of tech, the other has the power of the state (copyright). So I don't think that applies in this case specifically.

> freely sharing with attribution requested

If I share my texts/sounds/images for free, harvesting and regurgitating them omits the requested attribution. Even the most permissive CC license (excluding CC0 public domain) still requires an attribution.

> A few go further and assert that all information should be free and any proprietary control of it is bad; this is the philosophy behind the GNU project.

In this view, the ideal world is one where copyright is abolished (but not moral rights). So piracy is good, and datasets are also good.

Asking creators to license their work freely is simply a compromise due to copyright unfortunately still existing. (Note that even if creators don't license their work freely, this view still permits you to pirate or mod it against their wishes.)

(My view is not this extreme, but my point is that this view was, and hopefully is, still common amongst hackers.)

I will ignore the moralizing words (eg "ruthless", "harvested" to mean "copied"). It's not productive to the conversation.

I did not contribute a vote either way to your comment above, but I would point out that you get more of what you reward. Maybe the reward is monetary, like an author paid for spending their life writing books. Maybe it’s smaller, more reputational or social—like people who generate thoughtful commentary here, or Wikipedia’s editors, or hobbyists’ forums.

When you strip people’s names from their words, as the specific count here charges; and you strip out any reason or even way for people to reward good work when they appreciate it; and you put the disembodied words in the mouth of a monolithic, anthropomorphized statistical model tuned to mimic a conversation partner… what type of thought is it that becomes abundant in this world you propose, of “data abundance”?

In that world, the only people who still have incentive to create are the ones whose content has negative value, who make things people otherwise wouldn’t want to see: advertisers, spammers, propagandists, trolls… where’s the upside of a world saturated with that?

Yes, I have no idea either. I find it disappointing.

I think people simply like it when data is liberated from corporations, but hate it when data is liberated from them. (Though this case is a corporation too so idk. Maybe just "AI bad"?)