Contributing to human knowledge doesn’t pay the bills though

It can. The problem is the practice of using open source as a marketing funnel.

There are many projects that love to brag about being open source (it's "free"!), only to lock useful features behind a paywall, or do the inevitable license rug pull after other companies start profiting from the freedoms they've provided them. This is the same tactic used by drug dealers to get you hooked on the product.

Instead, the primary incentive to release a project as open source should be the desire to contribute to the corpus of human knowledge. That doesn't mean that you have to abandon any business model around the project, but that shouldn't be your main goal. There are many successful companies built around OSS that balance this correctly.

"AI" tools and services corrupt this intention. They leech off the public good will, and concentrate the data under the control of a single company. This forces well-intentioned actors to abandon open source, since instead of contributing to human knowledge, their work contributes to "AI" companies. I'm frankly not upset when this affects projects who were abusing open source to begin with.

So GP has a point. Forcing "AI" tools, and even more crucially, the data they collect and use, to be free/libre, would restore the incentive for people to want to provide a public good.

The narrative that "AI" will bring world prosperity is a fantasy promoted by the people who will profit the most. The opposite is true: it will concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few even more than it is today. It will corrupt the last vestiges of digital freedoms we still enjoy today.

I hope we can pass regulation that prevents this from happening, but I'm not holding my breath. These people are already in power, and governments are increasingly in symbiotic relationships with them.