I don't understand why there is so much love for Anna's archive here. I feel like I'm getting whiplash because there is so much hate for AI companies training and profiting off of the worlds knowledge without licensing it. And yet, a site that directly facilitates that by taking payments from AI companies is lauded as this amazing and honorable thing. Can someone help me understand what im missing?

In general I don't have many qualms with modern piracy, it just seems very hypocritical and I'm confused.

Obviously, not everyone on Hacker News shares the same opinion.

But, in general, Stewart Brand’s sentiment — expressed during a panel discussion at the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, when he said that “information wants to be free” — is broadly shared here.

His full quote was: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable… On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.” Steve Wozniak famously responded: “Information should be free, but your time should not.”

Even among those on HN who believe that copyright serves a societal purpose, many still want copyright terms to be drastically shortened (back).

So I’m skeptical that the hostility toward AI companies is primarily based on their training on, and profiting from, the world’s knowledge without licensing it. I suspect it is rather based on their doing so without making that knowledge accessible in return. In the recent news of their destroying books, it even means reducing the chance that that knowledge will ever become open.

Yes, opening the world’s knowledge can lead to good and bad uses — just like free software can be used for great as well as for nefarious purposes. We’re generally too techno-optimistic to judge technology solely by its worst possible outcomes. But for such a benevolent view to be justified, the potential benefits need to be also clear.

AI companies turn public data into closed commercial products. They are allowed to profit off your copyrighted data, but only they get to profit from their own models.

I'd imagine the backlash to AI companies from us white collar workers to be less severe if they have to publish their weights. In fact if you look closer you will see HN is actually pretty content with Chinese open models. It's the American AI corps with closed models that attract criticism.

> Can someone help me understand what im missing?

One directly threatens the livelihoods of the commenters here, the other doesn't ;-)

I don't hate either particularly, but I care more about getting any book I want whenever, wherever, than I care about some abstract far away moralizing of something of consequence to me only ambiguously.