> There's plenty to hate about how AI is transforming the world, but one thing it's not, is "robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up".

There's a way that many people fear this is true: what you're getting for "free" has some external cost that you aren't taking into account.

Cost 1. The environment. Tech companies were once significantly interested in efficiency, their carbon footprint, etc. With the advent of LLMs, this was thrown out the window. Concerned people are now thinking about water footprint, heat footprint, noise footprint, and probably more. These things are hard to put a dollar figure on in a short comment, but the sustanability of a liveable climate for the billions in this planet is literally priceless.

Cost 2. Employment. We face a significant cull of employability -- graphic artists, programmers, mathematicians, paralegals, and more are rightly fearful for the end of their career. If we're getting intelligence for "free" in 2026 dollars, but we can't get jobs in 2030, will all that content still be affordable in 2035?

Cost 3. Infinite investor dollars. The AI companies are burning cash at a historically unprecedented rate. This has attracted a lot of attention from traditional investors, like pensions, banks, etc. If all of this ends up in a free product, that doesn't sound like it'll return those investments. And that can crash the economy -- I ask again about real affordability in 2035.

I only see 2 consistent world views: either intellectual property is real, or it is a false concept and all information should be free.

If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft.

If IP is not real, then the algorithms and weights the AI companies have developed should also be free as they are just more information.

The status quo of "your knowledge has no protection, but our knowledge is sacred" is the worst of all possible worlds.

What do you mean, it's already robbing me of the ability to discuss techniques with a number of my peers since they decided the mediocre output of LLMs is good enough instead of understanding what they are doing.

In addition, a great number of people have decided to stop publishing their code publicly, and discuss techniques except in spaces they can be sure it's a one-on-one with a human being.

Some things already got lost.

>real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits

Again with the weasel words. Real people, including individuals? Pretty clear this is written from a pro-business perspective and can be safely dismissed.

>"robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up".

Well, it is that. Why is it criminal for me to steal a big-business-movie for personal use, but they can just take all my blog posts and sell their deritives to others?

The problem is the hypocrisy. They scrape, but don't want others to scrape them. If they act like they've been stolen from when they get scraped, that is a confession of guilt to when they did it themselves. They should be punished according to the same rules they wish to impose on others.

> the culture has not been stolen - it's still there

It's there in much diminished market, one that has been saturated overnight on a scale previously unfathomable. Their art is still there but it has been used against them to obliterate the playing field.

> nor are the people involved selling it back in any form.

Aren't all of these AI companies selling subscription models for people to create derivative art?

> And let's not forget what we got back for this

Get back for what, exactly? Didn't you just argue that no theft or sellback has occurred?

If we ignore the massive amount of books being destroyed, the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure), the increased difficulty to access public information such as Reddit and Twitter, and lastly ignore the amount of conversations being taken away from the public in favor of LLMs, I would agree.

Creators are unwillingly and contra to economic systems that have evolved over a few millennia entered in the Borg or the Matrix. So their achievements are reused for private and public benefits without their permission. Piracy is theft. And this piracy is a bigger theft than piracy on an individual download basis. Was there any doubt? (Linguistically I agree that you can’t “rob culture”. You can rape or reap culture though, and that is the point at hand.)

We got? We didn’t get anything last time I checked, we are offered to pay rent to access this intelligence, at a discount

>it's still there

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_evolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics

The past is still there, but our culture, being a live thing, is pretty much being affected by AI. We now have an artificial intelligence in this loop of exchange of ideas. Slopifying everything in its way.

It's a robbery of our future culture, at least.

This is true but it gets people who tied their value to outcomes, wealth accumulation, status accumulation upset. The road for this has closed.

Here's the thing. If any of my work is in their model, then I co-own their model as well as everything it makes.

I guarantee it's scraped our work.

So where's our paychecks.

> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. This rhetoric sounds impressive, but really looks more like "piracy is theft" line from early 2000s, similarly flawed in basic premise.

It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been.

I spent 20 years working as a freelancer and 10 years selling tech video courses. I made enough to have a happy life (not a lot but enough to survive), as long as the income kept flowing every month.

Nowadays I make nothing from a business I've built up for 2 decades because AI took away most traffic to my site which was the entry point to my business. I actually lose money because course sales have been impacted so heavily that I pay more for hosting than I get in sales.

AI is consuming an unimaginable amount of searches which is the gateway for so many businesses. It's preventing people from being discovered on the internet. Not only that but it's taking everyone's content and selling it back to users while keeping all of the profits.

Content creators are taking steps to prevent bot from walking away without compensation for their visit as if they’d been stolen from. At least Google, in the beginning sent traffic back that could potentially be monetized by the creator.

"It's still there" only in a technical sense because it's being buried by the automatic slop machines.

It used to be that, no matter what you want to do, there's a video on youtube of some guy who knows what he's doing showing you exactly how to do it. It could be, like, compressing a rear disc brake cylinder on a car or matching fiberglass gel coat colors, or carving a statue out of marble.

Theoretically those videos are still in there somewhere, all 15 years old at this point, but you'll not find them with youtube search instead you'll find a million AI slop videos no matter what you query.

Yet IP is processed (without permission, nor payment) and the software benefiting from it has a monthly fee

> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. This rhetoric sounds impressive, but really looks more like "piracy is theft" line from early 2000s, similarly flawed in basic premise.

This logic only works if you believe that IP has no value. Which is, of course, utter nonsense.

Microsoft doesn't believe this. Nor do any of the AI labs. Otherwise, they wouldn't have needed to scrape the data in the first place as it had no value. All of their software (and other products) would be developed in the open as there's no point in protecting the IP.

They work very hard to protect their own IP so they obviously believe that IP is worth protecting.

> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen

Considering its become exceptionally difficult to search for things that used to be easy to find, I have to disagree with you there.

The web has been polluted with trash, covering up all the original media with messy imitations.

Don’t copy that floppy!

It is robbery because you're not paying the person that produced the knowledge, you're paying the person that took the knowledge and put a chatbot interface on it.

It's different from search engines because you're not even getting the chance to monetize it yourself, you lose the ability to even show some ad for a pittance. Hell you don't even get credited most of the time. Many many people didn't give permission for the data to be ingested and used this way.

We've come out of decades of copyright infringement takedowns and pirating lawsuits only to end up in a position where people doing similar things as a corporation are making billions of dollars.

>> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there

This is good, but will not fly in court. Your honor... I only moved the Picasso...it is still there...

A distinction without a difference.

> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form.

But there's a real [1] transgression there, and attempting to lawyer it away is disingenuous. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it's sort of like if you blocked off the sun, and a farmer complained you stole his land, and then you retort "your land has not been stolen, you still have title and can occupy it." Your actions damaged him. Again, not a perfect analogy, but I think our efforts should go to recognizing the transgression instead of trying to deny it.

> And let's not forget what we got back for this: reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West, inference is so dirt cheap that whole world uses it. It exploded in popularity organically, because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses.

We don't have a society where "we got back" anything, and if you weren't aware, this "intelligence" is definitely getting metered. If anything "we" got undercut, and "our" assets lost a lot of their value, while others will get very rich from that loss. Come back with communism, and then maybe you'll have a point.

[1] Fuck you, Claude, for making me wince at that.

People like you is the reason I hate humanity. You steal and doesn't even have an ounce of morale in your heart.

I can't really tell if you are really evil and messed up inside or just stupid and can't reason.

Usually that stance means that you're not one of the people making culture.

It isn't you that AI communism is stealing from.

> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed

No, theft has been documented already many times. See how Facebook etc... slurped up data from Anna's Archive, Libgen and so forth. And many more examples here. The law classifies this as theft. Even digital theft is theft according to the law. Since corporations have too much money, nothing will happen, but we all see that this is theft. It is not clear why you do not see this.

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> it's still there

There are many refutations to this fallacy from the Slashdot era, but with AI it is even simpler than with music:

Clankers are only useful for current events (which most people use them for) by scraping the web and rewording it. This results in direct financial and notoriety losses for the original authors of the websites.

To use another Slashdot cliche: "But you knew that already."

AI didn't steal any culture. It just made mediocre culture more accessible. Turns out, most people do like mediocre culture. Previously, public TV channels could at least pretend that people enjoy educational content or classical music. AI exposed that lie. And now we're shocked that the emperor is naked.

> At least with LLMs we can glimpse an escape route to that which generations of humans have strived for - a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero.

Let me fix that for you: A world in the the value of the labor of each human approaches zero.

Flourishing life? Where is your data leading to the conclusion that AI models are leading to the world populace leading a ‘flourishing life’? Are taxes on revenue of companies like OpenAI somehow being collected and turned into a UBI and I just didn’t hear about it?

>a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero.

Just doesn't add up to a world where this benefits, if the thing takes no effort why would someone else pay for it?

Feel this with the big influx of people selling vibe coded software, if you could vibe code it why would I ever pay you for it instead of just making my own clone.

In the 50's there were predictions that in 10 years no-one will have to work again because of the advances made in automation, like the washing machine for example. Any predictions of less work this time around are a complete joke.

Considering that we don't seem able to appropriately tax the biggest corporations, why do you think we'll suddenly be able to redistribute LLM gains?

Far more likely is that wealth and power will become even more concentrated into the hands of the few and the rest of humanity will become effective slaves.

Is this "escape route" in the room with us now?

> a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero.

The AI bubble is pricing AI stocks so high that the only possible way for them to meet investors expectations is for AI to charge so much that every human & corporation has no money left.

> At least with LLMs we can glimpse an escape route to that which generations of humans have strived for - a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero.

Fantasy lets us glimpse anything.

US has been procrastinating reparations for slavery. LLM redistribution can't happen until the capitalism machines recursively solve "sins of our fathers".

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We don’t have to treat people reading books and companies stealing all human knowledge the same.

Also, companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves. I don’t believe any of these companies have paid for all the books they have trained on.

Regulation that said something like “we own 50% of your profit or 20% of your revenue, whichever is the larger” would.

If Apple can charge 30% to gate-keep mobile payments, we can surely charge that for the total information output of humanity.

When a human learns, they carry that forward into their future ventures. They might use their learning to recreate the original work and profit from it without attribution. In the West we view that badly and have legislation to protect from some abuses. But the same person might later collaborate with the original author, or make a derrivaive work that improves on the original (a la most science).

AIs automate the copying (and to some degree the derrivation mode too). They do it 1000s of times a day. The capital owners who provide this as a service are doing one of these two: - either claiming the IP isn’t valuable in the first place and charging only for the machinery they’re providing - or claiming the fees they charge contribute to the costs incurred with acquiring training data, but not sharing that with the training data creators in a royalties/licence-like manner (so, I’m sayung they’re devaluing the source material but not to zero, and resisting reasonable profit share or collaboration)

> and they would definitely not give it back for free.

...not like they are doing it for free now either.

open-weight is an economic war strategy of trying to undermine your competitors and prevent it from rising prices, thus preventing profit, driving them out of business.

> I put "stolen" in quotation marks because it's still unclear if we can call that stealing

It never was stealing: you can't steal a book by copying it. You can however commit copyright infringement.

This blatant disregard of licenses and copyright is clearly infringing on the authors ability to make a profit from their work, which was the whole point of copyright.

They knew it too, which is why they said nothing about the pirating and infringing until they got too big to fail.

So now we are left discussing and wasting time on what technically counts as infringing, pirating, stealing and whatnot.

All the while the small authors who can't possibly lawyer up against the literal biggest corporations on earth will just have to shut up.

Yet, somehow they had deals with Disney and other big names, proving that they did actually feel they need approval.

Their actions are two-faced, thus proving malice. Now we can go back to pointless technicalities.

Well theres at least two different buckets of this.

First is the scraping of the open internet.

The second is the paywall bypassing, YouTube audio recording, and pirated content training that the labs have basically admitted to in one form or another.

Content from both gets served back to us, in exchange for watching ads/paying a subscription/paying tokens.

The second is more immediately hypocritical because they are license/copyright/DMCA violations that the little guy could get sued for while the labs get $2T valuations for. The automation of crime at scale, which is a common VC pattern.

Legally mandating that companies open the weights of, say, 18-month-old models might change their minds a little.

I have no idea how any of this can be fixed but I do see compensation schemes for creators combined with open weights models to be the only way to minimise the harms to both creators and the commons.

Break up the multi trillion, multifaceted companies into the their separate facets. These companies all thrived on far significant smaller portfolios in the past. Cap the size a company can grow. Regulate the amount of compute they are allowed to use.

> Nobody would say a human reading a book and learning from it is stealing. I'm not saying that a machine doing the same is equivalent, but the only think I am sure of is that I am not sure we can call it "stealing".

It is stealing. A human paid for the book, compensated the author and learnt from it. The machine DID NOT pay for the book, DID NOT compensate the author and still learnt from it anyways.

We need to define machine in terms of "human-power"... much the same as how we already define automobiles via "horse-power". A single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 chip, for example, delivers roughly 35.58 teraflops of standard computing power (via 10,496 CUDA cores). That means 35.58 trillion calculations every second. In comparison, a mathematically trained human being, taking their time to solve a complex, multi-digit decimal division problem by hand takes roughly 100 to 120 seconds. That gives the human 0.01 flops. To match RTX 3090, you would need 3.56 quadrillion people working/learning in perfect sync. We can use a calculation similar to this to derive metrics on how much is being stolen for "learning/training" these models. The loot can be quantified.

EDIT: The reason I am comparing chip computation to human-power is because the authors of those digital works intended their works to only be read by humans. Not by some alien species (even if it be made of silicon) that incorporated their work into producing models.

So naturally the price should be determined based on this new species capabilities. I would not sell my software license for the same price to an Enterprise the size of Google that I would sell to a fellow developer. I price my product appropriately. With this entry of a new alien specie authors would need to have different tiers for them. Since these chips can train on petabytes of data and create models in a matter of days/weeks/months, it is obviously not comparable to a human being who has the capacity to ingest maybe 1-5 books a month at most. So the payout has to be different too.

A simple law stating that laundering data through an LLM does not constitute "fair use", that the outputs can be subject to copyright claims of the original authors, and that the outputs themselves do not qualify for copyright protections would go a long way.

It wouldn't kill the technology but it would make people more cautious in their use of it, which I think is needed right now.

> Would regulation help with that? Right now you can download free models that have been trained on that "stolen" data

We do have regulation against these issues. Companies spent years railing against piracy and IP theft enshrining it into law but now that it's being done by them en masse it's considered acceptable. The reality is that no regulation would help because we don't have regulators willing to enforce it nor do we have a legal system designed to help individuals against mass theft by corporations.

> With regulation and compensation, only rich companies would be able to do that

Well, with some imagination, you can have regulation that forces companies to open up, not just close down.

Imagine a law that stipulates that if you want to offer "LLM-inference-as-a-service", you need to also publish exact details about how it was trained, what datasets were used and also offer those exact weights for download.

Sure, this would never happen, but just offering another perspective on how laws and regulation can be used if it was wanted, locking stuff down and pulling up the ladder behind you isn't the only way to use laws, although that is a very popular reason and approach.

Culture robbery is not limited to AI. Any big concert for example is capitalismed to hell. So are neighborhoods. Where you used to have people just living, now you have an intentionally designed facade for people to live within. There was a comment on the 40C3 thread saying it's got too capitalist because of the ticket cost, and idk about that because it's always been hosted in commercial venues to my knowledge, but the vibe of the conference and the club itself are much less rebel than they used to be. Stuff like Burning Man now exists for people like Elon to go there and say "I was at Burning Man" and for people to get T-shirts saying "I was at Burning Man" and photos of themselves being at Burning Man more than for whatever the first few ones were about.

> Would regulation help with that?

I mean it's already happened, right?

I guess you could regulate it for new data, but most of the damage has already been done. IMHO the only fair thing right now, is to make sure it's equally available to anyone ...

Regulation can mean all sorts of things, including declaring the models themselves illegal.

Tech bros have a hard time understanding this, but a state can and will enforce its laws, even seemingly absurd one, if it wants to.

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The comment seems in line with real life, while your catchphrase about democratization is more like wishful thinking.

There are no viable free versions with sufficient computing power. The do-it-yourself AI is dangled as a carrot in front of users to camouflage the lock-in and rent seeking by Big AI. Go prove something new like Navier Stokes (replicating N-S itself no longer counts due to scraping and plagiarism) on your Mac Pro!

Paid influencers who perpetuate the open narrative are a whole new industry.

Even if there were open models, it is still IP theft and would not be "democratization" but "forced unpaid nationalization".

Ah, this remembers me when I was also young and naive.

Good times when we thought the internet would be great for democracy because knowledge would be easily available for everyone. Fast forward to 2026 and even the leader of terrible communist regime like China is looking better than the shitheads we got on the democratic west..

Wiki already democratized it just fine and was legitimately free for people who know how to read.

It's asinine that you think the sell it back to us argument falls short.

Not only does it distill our history to try to sound like some average version of us, it sounds like the blandest versions of us... And then sells this back to us.

From a coding standpoint, the tech is good and gets the job done. The pillaging of all other aspects of human history is just sad. With the only solace I'm seeing is that future training has to train on the dogshit versions of the internet that are now infected with LLM content.

It is woefully pessimistic indeed.

There will be new jobs coming from this.

The bountiful abundance of intelligence is truly the best thing that has happened this decade.

> Free versions are abundant,

Awesome, can I make my own competitive LLM, just like I can make my own open source software?

> and in some time useful models will ship preinstalled on all mobile phones.

Considering hardware prices, that "some time" is doing super heavy lifting. It could be 10-15+ years before that happens and the local LLM is actually useful. Most people don't see hardware prices declining from current prices until at least 2030, likely much longer.

Theres a big difference.

We have social conventions regulating this.

Suddenly, mega corporations were allowed to digest(sometimes by illegally pirating “data”, and sometimes by achieving their training corpus and subsequently destroying the copies) and digest this information in a novel way, without any discussion or law making.

You may argue it’s beneficial (it very well could be, I use ChatGPT and Claude all the time), but let’s not pretend it’s the same as learning from your history teacher…

Scale matters.

The average human doesn't do much on his own, and definitely doesn't uproot society or risk siphoning/leeching wealth from every person on this planet.

Partially true.

If StackOverflow dies because nobody uses it anymore, the entirety of its knowledge is now only available through LLMs that trained on it.

If a blog dies out because the author gave up writing, the entirety of its knowledge is now only available through LLMs that trained on it.

If people stop writing books because they cant outcompete generated content, that knowledge is also lost to LLMs.

If people stop making art because they can't outcompete generated art, that is also lost to LLMs.

So yeah, they haven't directly taken anything away, but the consequences of what they are doing may still have that outcomes - and it does look like that's the version of reality we're about to get.

Isn't that the same point piracy advocates have been making for a while? If I watch a pirated film, I didn't really consume a physical resource. Nothing physical is lost. Therefore it's not theft?

>Learning isn’t stealing.

This is cheesy. There is an exposure to (and a gain from) a resource that is traditionally associated with a cost. That cost wasn't paid. It's a public good to have information available, but it's not really acceptable to circumvent established ways of compensating the creator of the work you're benefiting from.

Imagine someone asks you how to do something at work, you tell them. Then they create a huge packet filled with bullshit about how it got done and now they are your boss.

That's true. However it does sometimes feel like our culture is being buried in slop.

Yes, you are getting a laundered version for a monthly payment to the rent seekers, who are 1000x worse than the RIAA.

And the internet is destroyed by slop spam in the process, so our culture is diluted and crowded out.

There are no open-source LLMs. There are only downloadable LLMs, with no source for the model being provided. The source for the training and inference programs is not the source for the model itself, which would be the training set, training program, and random seeds.

I wasn't aware of the "sweat of the brow" doctrine until you mentioned it. But you seem to be using it incorrectly. The doctrine only states that creativity or originality isn't required to make a work copyright-able.

Even if this were an accepted principle, that wouldn't change the principle of free use. In all of your examples, only re-printing all or substantial portions of the books of Andre D. Short would be copyright violations. Just referencing facts from Short's books, or even including small quotes, in your own new work is not a violation.

Yes? I own a lot of books that were public domain when published (as reprints). I could read them on Gutenberg, but I'm paying for the nice paper formatting.

In the Soviet Union the state owned all media (de facto) and you had to get permission from a party official before you published or copied anything. It's not the same thing as a free for all.

It's actually the first sentence from your quote. One state owned company had a monopoly on software exports. Soviet citizens were not allowed to write code and export it themselves, or import software from Western countries. They had heavy censorship and centralized control over everything.

In a way it's the ultimate endpoint of copyright. One {person, state, company} owns everything and you have to ask them for permission to do anything with it.

In a communist society there is no profit (or incentive for), thus no need for copyright laws.

It's not abolishing copyrights that would turn the US into a commie country, communism is about abolishing private ownership to the means of production.

> all the same knowledge is still out there though

> The markup is the millions in training they committed and the connecting the knowledge

Sure, but gated behind a hallucinating idiot.

> Would that resolve the injury caused by the intellectual osmosis?

Monetary compensation doesn't address the lack of consent. This type of usage was not anticipated when people made their intellectual product available for other humans to use. Scale does matter.

What would resolve the injury would be to ask people if they are willing to have their content used in this way and to not train on material without consent. This includes open source software with particular licenses requiring attribution.

Obviously there is too much money involved for this approach to work, but it strikes me as the most moral.

Agreed, but now they're trying to stop other people from copying data so that they can be the sole gatekeepers of humanities collective knowledge.

"copyright". its right there in the name of the rights.

Intellectual property works differently.

Defending the same entities getting large DoD contracts to use AI for killing?

Learning isn’t stealing, but if you’d set up a forum or hotline where paid staff would answer questions and write essay directly based on NYT content without a license for that content, that would probably be deemed illegal.

> This is such a brain-dead take. By that logic there could never be any kind of AI, because unlike a human it'd be completely forbidden from learning from the sources of knowledge from which humans learn.

Incorrect. You overlooked consideration.

You're ignoring that there are options other than theft. Heard of buying things?