| ▲ | TeMPOraL 4 hours ago |
| > It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. 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. Whether the end result threatens the form in which culture is created, at least beyond just threatening the business models of the gatekeepers, is a separate discussion, but you can't draw the heart-string-pulling "life's work got appropriated" arguments there so easily. 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. 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". |
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| ▲ | boothby 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | thewebguyd 12 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Infinite investor dollars This has another side effect in that it breaks the power that consumers have in the market to have a say in how resources get allocated, by voting with their wallet. The entire AI buildout is non-consensual. Individuals have zero say. We could all refuse to buy AI subscriptions and it would not matter because businesses will still buy, and, investors have decided that we are moving forward with this no matter what, seemingly whether anyone is actually buying or not. AI isn't necessarily unique here, but it is one of the biggest new examples of wealth inequality and how society at large are no longer the ones who get to decide how resources are allocated under a capitalist system, especially when the investor dollars behind it amounts to the GDP of a small nation. |
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| ▲ | cowanon77 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | qarl 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I only see 2 consistent world views Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior. Instead we should try to find the most practical solution that has the most benefit - which will probably be more complex than yes/no. | | |
| ▲ | zdragnar 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior. That very much falls within the "IP is not real" category. Taking a utilitarian approach here is exactly what the sam altman / effective altruist crowd is doing (or claiming, at least). Believe it or not, but there are different philosophies. The US Constitution, for example, is written under the framework that all rights are innate, and the government merely endorses, not grants, those which are described. This framework creates a moral basis to rights, such that things like property are not merely social constructs but moral goods. To violate them is itself an immoral act. | | |
| ▲ | tzs 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | You are assuming that social constructs are not real. | | | |
| ▲ | nostrademons an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Your wording is pretty revealing: > This framework creates a moral basis to rights The Constitution (and the thinkers that it was based off of) creates a moral basis to rights. At the time the Constitution was written, this was a pretty radical idea. The most prevalent moral framework at the time was the divine right of kings, the idea that the king was ordained by God to rule and anyone who questioned that right was speaking heresy. | | |
| ▲ | zdragnar 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | | My wording was actually wrong, as the constitution recognizes a divine source for the rights, it doesn't create the moral basis. Perhaps 'establishes as the formal basis' would have been more appropriate. You're right that it was a relatively radical idea at the time, but not without precedent. The Dutch, Venice and Genoa were republics, the Swiss Confederation was a union of cantons and territories, for example, not to mention the influence of the Iroquois Confederacy, John Locke, Montesquieu, and the assorted Greek and early Roman city states. |
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| ▲ | nz an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Funny how, when Aaron Swartz did the exact same thing (in a much narrower and more focused way), he was driven to suicide by the US government, but when Sam and Dario do it, people argue about whether (or not) "IP is real". Note that society is more about justice than it is about philosophy or logic. Whether you believe that IP makes logical sense or not, is not terribly relevant through the lens of justice. To allow the Altmans and Amodeis of the world to escape the kinds of consequences that Swartz could not (despite having purer intentions than either -- despite being a genuine utilitarian, instead of an aspiring oligarch _pretending_ to be one), would be the height of injustice. It would be a grotesque and cruel insult to all the people who remember Swartz, and share his values and optimism about the internet and computers. | | |
| ▲ | pixl97 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | What happened to Swartz was injustice. Why would I want it to happen to more people? This is, at least to me, an insane point of view. "Oh my god, the police just shot a black man for no reason. To make this fair they should also shoot more white people for no reason". Do you see how absolutely unhinged that sounds? | | |
| ▲ | jraph 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The parent comment highlights the double standards, they are not campaigning for pushing people to suicide. This is a strawman. Yeah, this double standards thing is profoundly unjust. |
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| ▲ | zdragnar 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | The funny thing about having a divine source for rights is also recognizing that humans are fallible and thus inevitably going to be unable to live up to that standard. This argument is the basis for people who want government to have limited powers- the less power it has, the less it can abuse it. There's a flip side to this as well- President Lincoln famously suspended habeus corpus unilaterally in violation of the Constitution, outright ignoring a Supreme Court ruling in the process. It became moot when Congress retroactively approved the suspension and allowed it to continue for the remainder of the civil war. Lincoln remains celebrated, despite what could rightfully be argued as blatantly unconstitutional power grabs. | | |
| ▲ | pixl97 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | reality > rights The use of the term divine at the time was more of an aftereffect of most people having some kind of belief in god and using that as a casus belli to redistribute power. The actual causal reasons seem more technological and more of England spreading themselves too thin. Lincoln went on to further prove there is no divine power enforcing these rights, it's the distribution of power and information that defines the rights you have. The Constitution is simply a piece of paper, not an agent. We see this happening again in our modern world. Technology has allowed us to concentrate information like never before. If you believe knowledge (hence processing of information) is power then we've created new power structures that must change society. Now, we can say things like "well, you can't concentrate information" but the other party can simply disagree and say it's my divine right to. You're at an impasse unless you plan on taking up a path to violence (any and every legal action is implied violence). |
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| ▲ | qarl 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > That very much falls within the "IP is not real" category. AH. Given that framing, then I suppose anything that varies from "these axioms are perfect there can be no others" must fall into the "not real" category. But isn't there some debate about the moral axioms themselves? A space that is much more complex than "yes/no"? EDIT: I always wonder, when I get two downvotes in the same moment, if someone is cheating. It happens so often. EDIT2: And now! 3 upvotes in the same moment. I daresay someone is confessing. | | |
| ▲ | yndoendo an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Social constructs are bought and paid for by the wealthy. Most people want a clean environment while the current US administration is pulling back environmental regulations to allow for more pollutants. The current US Supreme Court has taken gifts from those that have invested interest in the outcome of their judgements. Social axioms are mutable while mathematical axioms are immutable. Human trafficking is bad. How many of the wealthy that partook of Epstein's trafficking have been prosecuted? This shows that human trafficking being bad is mutable based on wealth and power. | | |
| ▲ | qarl an hour ago | parent [-] | | > Social constructs are bought and paid for by the wealthy. Well... no. I'd say that most of the social constructs I'm thinking of predate wealth. Most likely shaped by evolutionary pressures. > mathematical axioms are immutable I invite you to Google "the axiom of choice" to see a lively debate. | | |
| ▲ | zdragnar 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | So long as there have been people, there have been those who had more than others, be it material goods or power, which gains more material goods, which begets power. I'm not really sure there it's true that any society predates wealth, ergo no social construct predates wealth. | | |
| ▲ | pixl97 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | >ergo no social construct predates wealth. How wealthy is your dog? | |
| ▲ | qarl 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Right. I'm thinking of social behaviors that predate humans. |
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| ▲ | paimapi 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | no, I think people are just annoyed that you're trying to have an irrelevant and kinda cheesy 'is epistemology really real - think about it bro' conversation I'm also a fan of nuance and non-black&white thinking but that is quite literally not how the rule of law generally works | | |
| ▲ | qarl 18 minutes ago | parent [-] | | No - I'm specifically calling out that the total changes abruptly. As if someone were using multiple accounts. But I'm sure no one here would ever dare do that, so I should take it back. | | |
| ▲ | paimapi 16 minutes ago | parent [-] | | that's cool - I downvoted you because I was annoyed and I am an independent entity. hope that helps :) | | |
| ▲ | qarl 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Of course! My only suggestion is - if you're using multiple accounts to do it - that would be naughty. |
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| ▲ | palmotea 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior. Intellectual property is as real as private property (which is a lot more elaborate and weird than possession and territoriality, which is the most that has any natural basis). It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished and the other this fundamental sacred thing that should be respected absolutely (as many do). | | |
| ▲ | montagg 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | We made it up. We made all this up. We do it for an outcome. Intellectual property exists as a concept to foster the creation of more intellectual property. That is not the case for all private property, because I cannot copy your land or your car infinitely. That’s why IP rights expire at some point, or have fair use that doesn’t harm the IP rights holder, something other forms of property don’t have. Saying that they are equivalent is not foolish—I think that’s a bit extreme—but it doesn’t recognize that they have fundamental differences, and the laws around them have different intended outcomes. I think AI training falls most likely in the fair use category of intellectual property: there is some societal benefit* that requires no actual harm** to the IP holder, therefore it’s a good trade-off for society if we poke a hole in the social construct of property to get that benefit. *Let’s put aside the question of whether AI is good for society or private ownership of AI models is good for society. Important questions but separate from the theory. IF IT IS GOOD, it follows the above. If it is not good, then of course it does not. **Also not a fully settled question. Again, an important debate to have and the tradeoffs here matter. If the harms are small enough, the societal benefit could be worth it. Both notes have to be true for this to be worthy of “fair use”. | | |
| ▲ | ndiddy an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > Intellectual property exists as a concept to foster the creation of more intellectual property. The idea of IP as an economic tool to foster creation comes out of the UK and subsequently the US. In mainland Europe, IP comes out of the French Revolution and the idea that copyright is like a "moral right" that you intrinsically deserve for putting in the effort to create something. This viewpoint has de facto won out because as global commerce and global culture has become more and more widespread, everybody has standardized on the longest durations (the standard has long been "life + 50 years" in Europe) so one country doesn't have to worry about freeing up its works for "exploitation" by another country. | |
| ▲ | palmotea 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > That is not the case for all private property, because I cannot copy your land or your car infinitely. All property is fundamentally about exclusion and control to allow for private exploitation. That common bit of rhetoric about copying misses that point. The reason private property exists is not because land (for instance) can't be copied. > Saying that they are equivalent is not foolish—I think that’s a bit extreme—but it doesn’t recognize that they have fundamental differences, and the laws around them have different intended outcomes. You should note that you misread me: I didn't say they were identical in every respect, I said their "reality" is the same. They're both made up social constructs. One isn't more fundamental than the other. | |
| ▲ | tenuousemphasis an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is going to blow your mind, but people created music, literature, art long before intellectual property laws existed. IP laws are nothing but rent seeking. | | |
| ▲ | intended a minute ago | parent | next [-] | | [delayed] | |
| ▲ | palmotea an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > This is going to blow your mind No. it won't blow anyone's mind. Not a single person. > but people created music, literature, art long before intellectual property laws existed. ^^^ cherry-picked, incomplete reading of history. |
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| ▲ | dnautics 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished Hear me out. Property rights exist to assign stewardship and use rights over rivalrous goods. goods where the use of the good precludes the use of that good for its purpose by another party. If you take my bike, I cannot ride it to work. This concept exists to prevent violent conflict over non-shareables and to prevent the tragedy of the commons (see the highly successful fisheries rights, NOx and SOx emissions markets as propertization schemes) "Intellectual property" (except for trademark if you want to get pedantic), is not rivalrous, and its primary purpose is to be shared, not hoarded. Therefore intellectual property isn't a thing, creating it as a legal construct was a mistake that has hamstrung society for a long time. | |
| ▲ | qarl 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, that's why I said property (not just IP) is a social construct. | | |
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| ▲ | newyankee 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Sovereignty is the ultimate form of property ownership in a funny way. | |
| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | AlexandrB 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Property is a social construct in the sense that anything is a social construct. Like, sure, the fact that I "own" this spoon is societally constructed, but it's so foundational that almost every other aspect of human society is more abstract. Even animals have some sense of "property" - whether that's territory they defend or their stash of food. The social construct part is that we respect each other's property rights (mostly) without resorting violence, where animals resort to individual violence or threat displays. |
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| ▲ | ang_cire 9 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Objectively, IP exists and is acted upon, so IP is real, obviously, but IMO it is bad, and should not exist. People tend to forget that IP was not originally about digital distribution at all (copyright), it was about giving inventors exclusivity periods to profit without competition (patents). It was a misguided attempt to stop sometimes literal theft of designs from rival inventors, by tying the design to the person instead of whoever possessed the schematic. It's also a regime that in its modern incarnation protects businesses, not artists. | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft. It’s called Derivative Work and it’s a good feature for IP law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work You wouldn’t like a world where companies could copyright knowledge and then prevent anyone else from making a derivative of that knowledge. | | |
| ▲ | EagnaIonat 15 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > It’s called Derivative Work That would be on what the AI model generates, not what it is trained on. The latter is where the contention is, and it's a valid argument. So much so that some companies are not using stolen information to build their models. IBM for example indemnifies its models for its customers and has detailed information on where the sources came from to train them. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis a few seconds ago | parent [-] | | > The latter is where the contention is, and it's a valid argument It has been tried in court several ways already. Remember the lawsuit that forced Anthropic to use physical books? |
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| ▲ | verelo 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think the blend of the two is that value added to any information, such as the first time its distilled or positioned in a certain way, that's IP and should be real. When an AI company takes that type of value, and doesnt provide value back to the person who made it, thats theft. Information / facts are real and free. But those who helped us get here should choose how to license their work, and an AI company picking it up and re-selling it is clearly unethical. | |
| ▲ | ericmay 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It’s real but whether you can make a profit or not is dependent on whether you can protect the information. It has been this way since civilization as we know it started, I believe. If you are freely posting sentences like this was on the internet you are giving away your IP for free. Anyone can read the sentence. If someone can make money off of it then that’s just markets at work. I can’t make money off of what I write here, for example. But I also don’t think pirating a movie is theft either. You haven’t proven to me you’ve lost money. Maybe wouldn’t have watched it anyway. Fun topic | | |
| ▲ | simoncion 24 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > It’s real but whether you can make a profit or not is dependent on whether you can protect the information. That's what contracts and licenses [0] are for. Or perhaps you're arguing for a world where the only possible protection is that of trade secrets... that once protected information is made public by any means anyone can do anything they wish with it? If you are, then this quote [1] seems relevant: 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.
[0] ...which are contracts in disguise...[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754448> |
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| ▲ | nostrademons an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There are a wide variety of middle-ground views between them. Copyright law itself is one of them: it provides exceptions for transformative "fair uses", and there are some courts that have ruled that AI is one of them. Another might be Harbinger taxes on IP. | |
| ▲ | newyankee 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You would not download a car, would you ? Hell if a car was downloadable why would I not ? Your capability to make endless profit should be capped somewhere, if indeed it is Profit | |
| ▲ | lxgr 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Intellectual property is a legal fiction, not an empirical fact about the universe. It's as real as societies want it to be, and that view can change over time. | |
| ▲ | RyanHamilton an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Let me introduce you instead to the one golden rule. He who has the gold, makes the rules. | | | |
| ▲ | pton_xd 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah, this whole "we're being attacked by China, they're distilling our models!" thing is completely and utterly absurd. Insulting, even. Either IP exists and should be respected or it doesn't. And if model training is fairly "transformative" of the source work, then so is distilling. As Garry Tan suggested recently, we need to encourage a US distillation regime. Everyone should be free access and transform this information however they see fit. | |
| ▲ | toobulkeh 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Both can be true. IP is real and they created new IP off of stolen IP. | |
| ▲ | AlexandrB an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | IP is obviously not "real" like physical property is real. Moreso, IP is a restriction on free speech as it walls off some expression as "Copyrighted" so you can't legally express it yourself without paying someone for the privilege. That's not to say that IP is useless, but treating IP infringement as "stealing" was always a problematic shorthand. Previously, calling IP infingement "stealing" was the domain of corporate interest groups like the RIAA or MPAA, but with AI the winds have turned and supposed anti-corporate lefties are keen to treat IP infringement as theft to attack AI companies. There's very little intellectual consistency on either side of aisle here. | | |
| ▲ | tenuousemphasis an hour ago | parent [-] | | It's actually worse than that. IP laws trump property laws because they prevent you from using your property in ways you would otherwise be able to. It's nothing more than base rent seeking. |
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| ▲ | tripzilch 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | TeMPOraL 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That's people problems though, namely: 1) Lazy peers, and 2) Spiteful peers with "dog in the manger" mentality. The latter case personally irks me, mostly because this often involves personal benefit (economical or moral) due to them claiming to give away knowledge for altruistic reasons, which later behavior reveals was a lie, mislabeling proprietary as open and free, to reap unfair gains. But that's all off-topic for this thread anyway. | | |
| ▲ | gwbas1c 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Spiteful peers with "dog in the manger" mentality. Last night my daughter told me her friend (a boy) signed up to take the last spot of a baking class at camp just to spite his sister, who wanted it. Turns out he liked baking! --- I think this whole discussion shows that there's a lot of Calvinball going on with IP, where the creator keeps trying to change the rules as a way to defend their power and social order. | | |
| ▲ | 3ash87 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why don't you create something so that you, too, can join the evil class of creators that exploit OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX? | | |
| ▲ | shimman 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This may blow your mind but people have different value systems than the single one where only making money matters in our incredibly short lives. Some people believe in things other than accumulating money and immiserating workers. Your failure of imagination doesn't limit the actions people can take to shape society. We all have equal voices in that respect. I truly feel sorry for those with your mindset. It speaks volumes on the lack of community and friends you have where you think fucking them over to make money is a worthy pursuit. They use to banish greedy people from society in the before times, maybe we should start again as these people have no problem in destroying society for religious fanatical reasons. We shouldn't be accepting of them, especially when they're actively killing us all or making us miserable. | | |
| ▲ | iu123 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You are preaching this is response to a comment that mocks the notion that creators are the evil people while OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX exploit them? The comment was clearly satirical. | | |
| ▲ | gwbas1c 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, one of the articles on HN a few days ago pointed out that a lot of the wealthy spend a lot of their time and energy preserving the social order. (It was a long article trying to predict what people will do when they don't need to work.) To be quite blunt: I really don't think anyone who sells (or gives) IP to the general public has any right to control what happens to that IP after a fair period of time. That's why I say they're playing Calvinball: Changing the rules as they go for their benefit, so they can preserve the social order. | |
| ▲ | shimman 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nah, some tech people really believe this. You need to get out of your bubble and realize a nontrivial percentage of tech workers are very anti-human. |
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| ▲ | shepardrtc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People creating free software for everyone to use, only to pull it away when suddenly there's a technology that can instantly let everyone use it at the drop of a hat, is not something I quite understand. If you're doing it so you show people, hey I made this, then you can still do that. If you're doing it to help the world, then that's very much happening. Of if you're doing it just for fun, that's possible too, though I totally understand how much less fun it is when AI can rip it out in a few minutes. | | |
| ▲ | antihipocrat 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Some of it might be loss of external validation, no more stars in github. Some of it might be an aversion to a non-consensual contribution to the end of their chosen profession as a means to make a good living. Much of it might be because their license (MIT, BSD etc) was ignored completely. | |
| ▲ | Retric 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People have multiple motivations at the same time. Many OSS contributors have moved on after LLM’s and that’s completely consistent with their motivations. Some of the major OSS licenses require attribution when someone copies the work in question, AI companies fail to do so. People getting annoyed when others break the social contract has nothing to do with any other motives they can always benefit the world by doing something else. You may prefer someone continue maintaining infrastructure you use but they could be just as happy delivering food to the elderly. The desire for people to continue helping you is little more than entitlement here. | |
| ▲ | nz 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People were always able to "instantly use it at the drop of a hat" (paraphrased). What people are objecting to, is instant use without any acknowledgement or attribution (the minimum courtesy). They also object to being mistreated by people who have never actually had to type characters of code into a text-editor, or figure out how to use a build-system and version-control-system. And finally, they object to having their _free_ and _generous_ labor turn millionaires into billionaires (and billionaires into trillionaires), while they themselves still have to pay that one mortgage they have, and medical bills, and tuition, and so on. They object to the systematized devaluing of their work. They object to becoming a class of invisible laborers (who only become visible when there is need to blame someone). | |
| ▲ | latexr an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > is not something I quite understand I can only speak for myself, but right now working on open-source is even more thankless and shitty. Now any douche-knuckle comes to your repo and starts spamming you with bad PRs or issues as if their favourite LLM du jour has some fantastical insight they have to share with you, when it has already been explained ad nauseam that what they want is out of scope, or isn’t technically possible, or has tradeoffs XYZ. You had lazy people before, sure, but those interactions were less frequent, shorter, and for each person I used to craft a careful response that would explain everything in detail and teach those I interacted with. But why would I waste my time crafting a reply that the person on the other side is just going to shove into their LLM and learn nothing? Regarding open-source, LLMs make people more disrespectful of the people doing the work. And if you’re sharing your expertise for free to be disrespected, why bother? | |
| ▲ | 3ash87 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] |
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| ▲ | latexr an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > That's people problems though And the people make the culture. So, in effect, the culture suffered. I think you’re taking the original comment too literally with your “piracy is theft” comparison. Obviously you can’t literally rob culture¹, because culture is a concept. But you can lose something from it, and that loss can have a cause you can point to, so in a way elements of it can be “robbed”. That’s what I get from the original comment when I steelman it, anyway. ¹ Sounds like the name of a Rob Zombie associate. |
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| ▲ | burningChrome 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >> In addition, a great number of people have decided to stop publishing their code publicly, A lot of my peers who have been in tech for more than a decade are all doing this. They're effectively backing out of the industry. Their attitude now is they're ready for retirement in their 40's. They're only building and working on side projects and only sharing with people they know, nobody else. One thing I'm seeing right now is the amount of institutional and domain knowledge being lost is a on a massive scale. The more startling fact is nobody seems to care - as if vibe coding and LLM's are going to fill this gap. | | |
| ▲ | rpdillon 27 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It's interesting to me that the actual motivations for releasing code open-source were very different than I had assumed for the past ~30 years. I always liked to give stuff away so folks could play with and try stuff. As far as I can tell, the only reason not to still give away code is the desire for credit, which was never all that interesting to me. But then again, I haven't devoted my life to developing and releasing a huge open source project used by millions, so perhaps my opinion should be discounted accordingly. |
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| ▲ | nradov 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The majority of code has always been proprietary and never published. But there's also more open source code being published than ever before. | |
| ▲ | phoronixrly 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I still do open-source. You just get the code on a CD like the good old times! | |
| ▲ | 6510 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > a great number of people have decided to stop publishing their code publicly Stopped publishing anything and stopped creating anything. But in all fairness this started long ago. I remember a conversation where I asked someone who read a niche blog every day why he never posted a comment. (the blog had zero comments) If you like what they wrote and have thoughts about it, why not "honor" them with a few words? How is that to much to ask? They clearly just never bothered to but in stead made up all kinds of excuses. Imagine having to explain that you can respond if someone talks to you? If there was a culture surely it ended there? | |
| ▲ | IAmBroom 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're discussing your peers' behaviors, not AI. It's the same as saying "People don't kill people; guns do." Maybe guns(AI) should be regulated, but the primary problem is murderers(lazy peers), not weapons(AI). | | |
| ▲ | FromTheFirstIn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If this is your stance on guns, I’m not surprised by your calloused take on AI | |
| ▲ | ndsipa_pomu 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yet countries that have strong regulation of firearms have significantly less murders (and accidental shootings) than countries that don't regulate them. That does suggest that along with murderers, the easy accessibility of firearms is a problem (assuming that the ratio of murderers in different populations is approximately the same). | |
| ▲ | malfist 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Just like with guns, AI is a crime of scope. I can be a murderer with a knife, sure, but how many people can I kill? How many people can I kill if I have a class three license an a full auto gun? I can pirate a news article here or there, sure, but how many news articles can I pirate? How many news articles can I pirate with AI? | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > How many news articles can I pirate with AI? Not much more than with a bash/curl loop. Which, on one hand, AI can write for you, but on the other hand, AI will make you no longer need to pirate those articles in the first place. Also it's not end-user piracy being discussed - it's the act of training AI itself that's accused here to be "robbery of our culture". |
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| ▲ | snypher 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >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? |
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| ▲ | philipov an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | rpdillon 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I really agree with this critique! It's very hard (without hiding behind ToS) to claim that creating the models was A-OK, but distilling them is some sort of ethical breach or attack. |
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| ▲ | AlecSchueler an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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? |
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| ▲ | MattDaEskimo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | ch4s3 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Your talking about a bunch of books that are out of print and sat unsold for years in a warehouse somewhere. The rights holders could print another run tomorrow if they wanted, or better yet digitize them but they don’t. Where’s your ire for the rights holders who sit on these books and don’t do anything with the ? | | |
| ▲ | MattDaEskimo 28 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | It's the collective action of losing access to information that's the issue, not the potential of the book itself. Regardless, these books were available. Researchers, hobbyists - many people have and will find value. Justifying the destruction of information for a for-profit company is bizarre. | | |
| ▲ | rpdillon 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Destruction of books is normal and totally OK. Publishing houses do it daily in the thousands. When you own something, you can choose how to dispose of it. Come back when you have the title of actually valuable rare books that were bought and destroyed. The 404 article was not well researched in this regard. The emotional reaction we're conditioned to have hearkens back to 1940s Germany, where the goal was to have people burn all the copies of existing works. But this is not that. They are going for "one of each book" so they have a comprehensive corpus of works to train from. They are willing to buy books to obtain this corpus. It sounds like the system working exactly as intended, with even the book sellers selling these books saying they are "dead inventory". There's a time to be breathless about "destroying all of humanity's knowledge", but let's wait until it's actually happening. Again, I'm am very anxious for anyone to come forward with credible information about any valuable/rare/irreplaceable book that was destroyed in this process. So far zero people have been able to do this, probably because they are buying the books in bulk and want to obtain them as cheaply as possible. Book sellers will know the value of any actually rare/valuable books, and would charge accordingly, which would be pointless for e.g. Amazon to pay. They don't need some crazy first edition, they just need some copy to digitize. The incentives just don't add up to "Amazon is buying priceless art and burning it!" the way the narrative suggests. |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | shimman 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "Yes we are destroying books but it's your fault!" Can't believe this is the brain trust of the tech world. It really speaks on how poor SF + VC are at US politics. | | |
| ▲ | BeetleB an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | They legally bought the books they are destroying. I have every right to burn all the books I possess. And so should they. | | |
| ▲ | shimman an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | "Shut up, we have the right to destroy cultural artifacts because we have money." lol this is even stupider than the previous comment. Yeah golly gee, I wonder why the majority of the American electorate distrust tech companies, tech leaders, and tech workers? Y'all need to do some mutual aid and get your humanity back. | |
| ▲ | GuinansEyebrows an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | the argument of some hypothetical "right to burn all the books i possess" is not really the topic of discussion here. it's not a "can" argument, it's a "should" argument. |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | BeetleB an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Most of these things are bad. None of them is robbery, though. Some are of questionable legality, but most are not. People need to face reality. The old Internet was fragile and couldn't have lasted long. It was dying slowly due to closed social media and LLMs are accelerating that death. I'd rather it die quickly and be replaced by something more robust than decay slowly. I was sick of how it was before LLMs even came among. | |
| ▲ | skarz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Except books are already destroyed in physical form every single day. My local library has a section near the front for free and/or extremely cheap books ($1) they are desperately trying to get rid of. My impression is that if they are untaken/unsold they will end up in a dumpster. [Edit] Here's an article from 2003 talking about how Random House destroyed up to 25,000 books a day: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/19/fiction.stephe... | | |
| ▲ | lenkite 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The scale is completely different. It is like comparing a tiny ant to a Star Devouring Shoggoth. Anthropic destroyed millions of books in hardly any time. They are destroying the foundations of civilization https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli... | | |
| ▲ | rpdillon an hour ago | parent [-] | | > They are destroying the foundations of civilization No, they are not. For all the hype around that 404 media article, no one came forward with titles or authors. Turns out the booksellers that sold them those books said they were "dead inventory". If you're going to assert that companies are destroying the foundations of civilization, you're going to have to produce quite a bit more evidence than the (poorly cited) 404 Media article. | | |
| ▲ | lenkite an hour ago | parent [-] | | Evidence ? Good lord, how about the US district court of justice ? Anthropic physically destroyed millions of books after scanning them - are you really, truly questioning that ? Here is what was signed by Judge Alsup at https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo... > Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase MILLIONS of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals. Dismissing the above as "dead inventory" is atrocious reasoning. The more obscure/low-circulation books are arguably MORE valuable as training material because they contain information that is less likely to be duplicated across the ordinary web. And 404 Media's reporting wasn't merely based on a bookseller's terminology of your "dead inventory". There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world" https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-que... | | |
| ▲ | rpdillon a minute ago | parent [-] | | They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object. But nothing you're citing adds up to "destroying the foundations of civilization". What we have instead is companies that are now paying to get copies of creative works (isn't this what everyone is complaining about with all the "theft" rhetoric?) so they can use them for training. When they discuss scanning all the books in the world, they are not talking about every copy, since that makes no sense. They want one of each. So, in the end, this all sounds like some breathless emotional take because large companies are buying copies of books and using them to train AI and throwing them away. They are probably destroying fewer books than the publishing houses do over the same time period. This is like the water discussion: people with no understanding of agriculture (or publishing) hear a sound-bite about what AI is doing, and, with little-to-no context, devolve into a panic about it. Again: cite real harm. What books aren't available? What knowledge was destroyed? There are real concerns about AI, but this whole discussion is a distraction. |
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| ▲ | TeMPOraL 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > the massive amount of books being destroyed Surely that's not about AI? Or you mean the small fraction of that that's result of "destructive format shift" process[0], which itself is a consequence of copyright regulation that would otherwise prevent anyone from accessing these works? > the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure) That's assumed to be AI companies for some reason, even if they have no real incentive to do that, while the usual business underbelly of people scraping web for whatever reasons (which now may include some AI upstart wannabies too, to be fair) is forgotten about. Not helping is people confusing AI agents acting as user-agents and doing one-off fetches with "AI scrappers". > the increased difficulty to access public information such as Reddit and Twitter It was never public, and they started locking down before AI, when both platforms (as well as all other social media platforms) run out of VC subsidsies and realized they need to start monetizing; first step they did was to wage a war on third-party clients and API users. AI came later. > ignore the amount of conversations being taken away from the public in favor of LLMs You mean human agency? Like, humans deciding it's better for them to ask a machine instead of posting questions online? I can understand that, it's usually much better experience (particularly on sites like StackOverflow - they dug their own grave here, and they know it; there have been memes about this way before LLMs were a thing). You're also not considering the amount of questions answered that would not have been asked otherwise. I for one don't ask many questions on-line, so anything I ask LLMs that they solve for me, is a question that would've remained unanswered for me otherwise. Not everyone is gregarious online, many people are more self-reliant and only answer questions, but solve their own problems without asking for help (it's probably not optimal thing to do, but that's another topic). -- [0] - Digitizing and retaining physical copy is clear infringement, digitizing but destroying the physical original can be argued to be fair use. | | |
| ▲ | watwut an hour ago | parent [-] | | > You mean human agency? Like, humans deciding it's better for them to ask a machine instead of posting questions online? Oh, please, AI is single most hated technology to the level we did not seen before. And that is after staggering propaganda going out of these CEO that hiding behind human agency is beyond lie. It was pushed on us, whether we like it or not, because people with a lot of money are the only ones who matter. And people with a lot of money have that weird cult belief in emerging AI god and singularity, so they dont care what they destroy in the process. |
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| ▲ | internet101010 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Eh, StackOverflow deserved to go. |
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| ▲ | wjnc 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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.) |
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| ▲ | mrngld 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | HN crowd: Check out my Plex server and 132TB media collection!
Also HN crowd: Reading publicly posted information on the open internet is morally outrageous theft of the highest order | | |
| ▲ | pbhjpbhj 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Aside from other issues, do you not see a difference between a company committing copyright infringement at global scales never before seen (except with Google Books), who then use the fruit of that to sell a service at a high cost, VERSUS an individual person watching media at home with no profit (where it has been shown that _as a class_ these sorts of infringers spend more on media than other people). Yes, HN often has cliques wth opposing views, but I don't even think that's necessary to recall in order to see a problem with corporations who, in order to make their product, commit copyright infringement of billions of works. These opinions are entirely my own personal views. I do not support tortuous infringement. | |
| ▲ | NateEag 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, in a huge crowd of people, you will get differing opinions. Do you have any other obvious facts you'd like to pretend are somehow relevant? | | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Because of the nature of upvoting on social media, we can pretty accurately dial in on what the crowds consensus is. Your response makes sense when we are pulling random marbles from a bag, like old school forums, but social media abandoned that style of commentary long ago. |
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| ▲ | duskdozer 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'd bet if you asked a bunch of people off the street, you'd have a number of different takes on the ethics of stealing a loaf of bread, depending who stole it, from whom, and why. | |
| ▲ | tmcb 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People with a 132TB media collection don’t usually act as if they wrote and directed The Godfather. AI steals by lacking the ability to properly do either attribution and citation, whether this is accidental or by design. Downloading an existing PhD thesis without permission is very much different from submitting an existing PhD thesis as yours. | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Also, The crowd: "Knowledge should be free! Culture belongs to all of us! Information must be democratized!" AI companies *proceed to copy literally everything and put it through virtual blender, until an universal general-purpose problem-solver tool comes out, then give it out for free or serve for peanuts to literally everyone on the planet with Internet connection * Crowd: bbb..buuut not like that! | | |
| ▲ | oefrha 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I’m paying $200/mo for non-crap versions of said “general-purpose problem-solver tool”, which is not far from the median income of “everyone on the planet with Internet connection”. And I’m told I’m already getting a huge discount by using thousands of dollars of compute by raw API pricing. That just doesn’t sound like peanuts at all. | |
| ▲ | AgentOrange1234 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "Give it out for free or serve for peanuts" is doing a lot of work here. The crowd should be skeptical that this will continue given how many times we have seen enshittification unfold before. Before LLMs, "knowledge should be free" was a call to preserve an open playing field where everyone has the ability to access the intellectual labor of humanity so they can contribute, instead of letting a few institutions wall it off for a profit. As knowledge is walled off behind these models, rent seeking will expand, "safety guardrails" will become more onerous, and the masses will lose their access. There are wonderful parallels between this and enclosure in Britain. | | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >instead of letting a few institutions wall it off for a profit. I cannot repeat enough that that is not true, or even remotely close to true. When ChatGPT helps me fix my toilet, saving me a $300 plumber call, I don't cut OAI a check for $300 instead. It is unbelievably easy to harvest more than $20 of value from all the basic plans. Right now, users are overwhelmingly capturing all the value. Even if they triple the price, it's trivial for most workers to easily justify it. We can project any future scenario we want, but right now the labs are only capturing a tiny fraction of the value they are creating. Especially for the crowd here on HN. | | |
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| ▲ | convolvatron an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm anti IP in theory and practice. If this results in undermining vengeful protection of the Annas and the Aarons of the world, I'm all for it. But it's not, is it. If the corpus and the models were all free, that would be lovely, and qualitatively quite different. but its not, the old IP model is still intact, except these guys get an exception. and they get to scream bloody murder about distillation. they get to use their massive funding to try to draw a moat around that knowledge and expression with the goal of rent seeking from this point onwards. I'm not supposed to be able to access the original works anymore, but instead the proprietary, newly biased, blender output that contains a little bit of it. also not at fan of what its doing to the creative process, but you're right here. that's on us for being so easily seduced and not being able to limit ai usage to solving rote problems instead of creative ones. | |
| ▲ | GlacierFox 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There's some nuance there you're purposefully/ignorantly supressing to create a more impactful fundamentalist observation, completely contrary to the comment you described above as : "heart-string-pulling "life's work got appropriated" argument" I think the water is very muddy in regards to this topic and comments like yours really highlight the distain some people have for others that have talking points about with things they create being thrown into a gargantuan 'blender' as you called it. | |
| ▲ | watwut an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Except that no one is freeing or democratizing the knowledge. We all know that the plan is to take it, destroy original sources and then become the solo monopoly provider. The plan is to extract staggering amounts of money from the rest of us - they have to pay those debts. Plus, it is not an universal general-purpose problem-solver either. I mean, actual plan is to "make humans obsolete", "make everyone unemployable" and create weird techno fascist utopia from Thiel money. I personally don't find those sci-fi parts likely to happen. But these people do actually mean them, so. It is just a few months ago when they were dancing victory dance about how they destroyed all the film makers and artists (practically they did not), as if that was something praise worthy or aspirational. |
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| ▲ | qahr16 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Amodei: Check out my 1000 Exabytes torrent collection, which I weaseled out of with a $1.5 billion bribe. The usual human reading information on the internet does nothing with it. They don't adapt the style, they don't translate, they don't reblog a modified version. The ones that do have been criticized for stealing blog posts already before AI. | |
| ▲ | sham1 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | An individual pirate is morally a lot less objectionable than the capitalist class pirating from literally everyone else. Yeah sure, it's on the open Internet, but then again, the capitalists could also actually adhere to the licensing terms of the free software they're hoovering up and all that. These are the same people who want to enforce all kinds of EULAs against the commons, employing measures such as DRM to protect their "intellectual property", so why is it suddenly okay to not comply with IP when it's them doing the infringement? And that's just with software, but this also affects other creative endeavours. Also the individual HN user's 132 TB Plex server doesn't suck up ludicrous amounts of resources from the commons. |
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| ▲ | blks 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| We got? We didn’t get anything last time I checked, we are offered to pay rent to access this intelligence, at a discount |
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| ▲ | highspeedbus 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >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. |
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| ▲ | augment_me an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is true but it gets people who tied their value to outcomes, wealth accumulation, status accumulation upset. The road for this has closed. |
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| ▲ | Lambdanaut 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | nickjj 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | avaer 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been. It's literally stolen IP. One minus epsilon of the corpus did not give informed consent, or get compensated. The fact that it's laundered doesn't make it any less literally stolen. | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been. There actually was theft. See how some big corporations slurped data from Libgen and Anna's Archive. Where did they pay for this? See also this article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/03/meta-has-stole... And similar articles. It is theft - there is no denying in that. All these companies owe us a ton of money. But Trump protects the AI mafia so we won't get compensation for the damage they cause here. |
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| ▲ | testbjjl 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | somenameforme 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Perhaps some. But I'd wager orders of magnitude more are using LLMs to brainstorm if not outright generate content for them, which they are then reframing as their own creation. |
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| ▲ | jordanb 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "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. |
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| ▲ | franczesko 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yet IP is processed (without permission, nor payment) and the software benefiting from it has a monthly fee |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | lkjdsklf 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | pfortuny 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yep: the problem with IP is exactly the "Property". The texts are economically (even if only for leisure) valuable, so the producer deserves a fair comoensation unless he has explicitly dismissed it. So paying a price for an intelectual product is reasonable. Nothing to do (per se) with property. | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | And if attribution is their coin then they should be properly attributed even if they aren't paid. |
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| ▲ | ChiperSoft 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | nradov 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | LLMs have made it easier than ever so search for things. I remember fumbling around with Google, trying different combinations of search terms and never hitting useful results. Now I can give a vague or even partially wrong prompt to an LLM and it sort of magically figures out exactly what I actually want and takes me right there, along with a helpful summary and analysis. |
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| ▲ | cranberryjoe 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Don’t copy that floppy! |
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| ▲ | micromacrofoot 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | Betelbuddy an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >> 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... |
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| ▲ | GPerson 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| A distinction without a difference. |
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| ▲ | palmotea 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | copemaxxxing 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | conartist6 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Usually that stance means that you're not one of the people making culture. It isn't you that AI communism is stealing from. |
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| ▲ | shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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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| ▲ | enraged_camel 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [flagged] |
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| ▲ | 907qz-qwt5 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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." |
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| ▲ | anal_reactor 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
