> You refusing to write open source will do nothing to slow the development of AI models - there's plenty of other training data in the world.

There's also plenty of other open source contributors in the world.

> It will however reduce the positive impact your open source contributions have on the world to 0.

And it will reduce your negative impact through helping to train AI models to 0.

The value of your open source contributions to the ecosystem is roughly proportional to the value they provide to LLM makers as training data. Any argument you could make that one is negligible would also apply to the other, and vice versa.

> You refusing to write open source will do nothing to slow the development of AI models - there's plenty of other training data in the world.

if true, then the parasites can remove ALL code where the license requires attribution

oh, they won't? I wonder why

> there's plenty of other training data in the world.

Not if most of it is machine generated. The machine would start eating its own shit. The nutrition it gets is from human-generated content.

> I don't understand the ethical framework for this decision at all.

The question is not one of ethics but that of incentives. People producing open source are incentivized in a certain way and it is abhorrent to them when that framework is violated. There needs to be a new license that explicitly forbids use for AI training. That may encourage folks to continue to contribute.

The ethical framework is simply this one: what is the worth of doing +1 to everyone, if the very thing you wish didn't exist (because you believe it is destroying the world) benefits x10 more from it?

If bringing fire to a species lights and warms them, but also gives the means and incentives to some members of this species to burn everything for good, you have every ethical freedom to ponder whether you contribute to this fire or not.

Guilt-tripping people into providing more fodder for the machine. That is really something else.

I'm not surprised that you don't understand ethics.

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OP is asserting that the danger posed by AI is far bigger than the benefit of FLOSS. So to OP AI is the bath water.

Kind of kind of not. Form a guild and distribute via SAAS or some other undistributable knowledge. Most code out there is terrible so relying on AI trained on it will lose out.

GenAI would be decades away (if not more) with only proprietary software (which would never have reached both the quality, coordination and volume open source enabled in such a relatively short time frame).

I'd love to see a citation there. We already know from a few years ago that they were training AI based on projects on GitHub. Meanwhile, I highly doubt software firms were lining up to have their proprietary code bases ingested by AI for training purposes. Even with NDAs, we would have heard something about it.

Where did most of the code in their training data come from?

> If not you, other people will write their code, maybe of worse quality, and the parasites will train on this.

this is precisely the idea

add into that the rise of vibe-coding, and that should help accelerate model collapse

everyone that cares about quality of software should immediately stop contributing to open source

I'd rather the internet ceased to exist entirely, than contributing in any way to generative "AI"

At least the contribution back can happen. You're right though, it's not perfect.

This goes against what Stallman believes in, but there's a need for AGPL with a clause against closed-weight models.

Yes, but unfortunately this never happens; and depressingly, I can't imagine it happening.

The open source movement has been exploited.

I'm not sure I follow your line of reasoning.

The exploited are in the wrong for not recognising they're going to be exploited?

A pretty twisted point of view, in my opinion.

The AGPL does not prevent offering the software as a service. It's got a reputation as the GPL variant for an open-core business model, but it really isn't that.

Most companies trying to sell open-source software probably lose more business if the software ends up in the Debian/Ubuntu repository (and the packaging/system integration is not completely abysmal) than when some cloud provider starts offering it as a service.

It’s fair to call out that both aspects are two sides of the same coin. I didn’t try to “get” anyone

The quotation marks indicate that _I_ don't think it is. Especially given that modern deep learning is over-paramaterized to the point that it interpolates training examples.

I imagine a license agreement would only apply to using the software, not merely reading the code (which is what AI training claims to do under fair use).

As an analogy, you can’t enforce a “license” that anyone that opens your GitHub repo and looks at any .cpp file owes you $1,000,000.

This varies. The lawyers for risk-adverse companies will make sure they follow the licenses. There are auditing tools to make sure you're not pulling in code you shouldn't. An example is Google's go-licenses command [1].

But you can be sure that even the risk-adverse companies are going to go by what the license says, rather than "community norms."

Other companies are more careless.

[1] https://github.com/google/go-licenses

Nothing says reduce and reuse like building huge quantities of GPUs and massive data centers to run AI models. It’s like composting!

> For better or for worse, the courts decide what is transformative fair use.

thankfully, I don't live under the US regime

there is no concept of fair use in my country

> Characterizing the discussion behind this as "sophistry" is a fundamentally unserious take

What a joke. Sorry, but no. I don't think is unserious at all. What's unserious is saying this.

> and the training material was obtained legally

And assuming everyone should take it at face value. I hope you understand that going on a tech forum and telling people they aren't being nuanced because a Judge in Alabama that can barely unlock their phone weighed in on a massively novel technology with global implications, yes, reads deeply unserious. We're aware the U.S. legal system is a failure and the rest of the world suffers for it. Even your President routinely steals music for campaign events, and stole code for Truth Social. Your copyright is a joke that's only there to serve the fattest wallets.

These judges are not elected, they are appointed by people whose pockets are lined by these very corporations. They don't serve us, they are here to retrofit the law to make illegal things corporations do, legal. What you wrote is thought terminating.