> It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up

Learning isn’t stealing. They didn’t take our culture away from us and nobody is “buying our culture back” from them. We never lost it; it never went anywhere.

▲

guhcampos 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	TeMPOraL 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> If $X dies because ..., the entirety of its knowledge is now only availabe through LLMs that trained on it. And archive.org. And scraped copies people have around for various reasons. And libraries. And even in the first-party source, should they just leave it be instead of shutting down and destroying copies in pure spite. The knowledge did not disappear, and it shows no sign of disappearing faster than it loses value - which is the usual case, as all the examples you gave always come with an expiry date. For StackOverflow, that's measured in low years; for blogs, high years to a decade. Past that point, we enter the realm of curating and preserving knowledge past its commercial utility expiry date, which is a separate endeavor, and one that LLMs not only don't threaten, but actively aid.
	▲	JimDabell 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You are mixing up culture, data, and the creation of new works as if they are the same thing when they are very different.

▲

zero-sharp 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	JimDabell 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Isn't that the same point piracy advocates have been making for a while? No. Plenty of people – not just “piracy advocates”, whoever they are – have pointed out that copyright infringement is not theft over the years. Learning, copyright infringement, and theft are three distinct things. Learning isn’t copyright infringement. Learning isn’t theft. Copyright infringement isn’t theft. These are all different statements, and all are true. > There is an exposure to (and a gain from) a resource that is traditionally associated with a cost. “Gaining exposure to” isn’t theft either. Copyright isn’t some form of “super-ownership” that gives you absolute say over what happens to all copies of the work. It is very specifically a monopoly on the production of new copies, and even that is limited in many important ways and is not absolute. There is a form of control over information that matches what you want copyright to be though - trade secrets. If you want legal protection that allows you to control knowledge, then it needs to be a trade secret.

▲

franktankbank 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲

TeMPOraL 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It's a shitty move, but ultimately, in between the bullshit narrative, they also did the thing - not you - so the promotion rightfully belongs to them.

Execution trumps ideas, impact trumps raw effort, and such. Isn't this the entrepreneurial narrative?

	▲	franktankbank 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure thats obviously how it works today. Now what do I do next time someone comes and asks how to do something?

▲

bkaae 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

▲

2ahsg1 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.