I personally don't care about the morality, I'm just pointing out an absurd double standard.

You cannot claim that AI labs are bad for illegally downloading content to build their AI without paying creators, and that AA is good for illegally offering the same content.

I think both are immoral, but I definitely pirate all the content I can (except video games but only because it's unsafe, not to remunerate creators).

It is not grey at all, this is some bullshit that people tell themselves to feel better. Whether it's using the output of AI models or downloading a book on Anna's Archive, you are ultimately robbing the creator of profits.

Nobody on HackerNews would argue otherwise if their employer stole their code from their mind and didn't pay for it.

> Whether it's using the output of AI models or downloading a book on Anna's Archive, you are ultimately robbing the creator of profits.

You're correct in the above, or at least I'm willing to accept the premise for the purposes of this argument.

However, it's not that simple when it comes to the morality of the actions since there are secondary effects.

You can't just make a blanket statement like "stealing is immoral", for example, when there are circumstances where stealing is absolutely the moral imperative (e.g. the food is held by barons who charge unaffordable prices and the populace is starving to death).

Or, to make an example closer to the topic, what about the stealing of scientific papers? There's a strong arguments to be made that millions of people have been helped through that theft. And yes, the gatekeepers of that knowledge have been harmed.

And it's like that with AA and AI (and their code) as well. People consider the secondary effects and whether or not the greatest good is served.

And, of course, "greater good" is gray.

I agree that it's not grey at all, but because they're both so obviously good (particularly labs releasing open weight models). It's great that there are organizations making it ~free for anyone in the world to obtain information instantly. On the contrary, our policy of restricting something that naturally can be duplicated an unlimited number of times for free is obviously morally bad. People should be incentivized to create new ideas, not rent old ones for a century.

Of course on a related note, most work that's interesting to me was created by people who are dead anyway, so they don't mind.

Anyway, are you sure most people that support AA don't also support e.g. Deepseek and Qwen's efforts?