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

At a mark-up would mean it’s more expensive. The outrage is that they’re taking knowledge that was expensive to access because you had to hire experts or otherwise pay a lot of money for it and making it accessible to anyone who signs up for the ChatGPT free tier.

Calling it “robbery” is also specious as no knowledge was taken away from anyone. The content in the training sets was out there in the world one way or another. It still is!

I’m really perplexed by this sudden swing toward the idea that knowledge is something that we should encourage or incentivize to keep locked away or that other people should be forced to pay for use of knowledge. Roll back the clock a few years and tech sites would be almost unanimous about knowledge being free and unrestricted for the benefit of humanity. I’m keeping knowledge separate from actual direct rote duplication of content.

Now we have this amazing era where I can download models to my computer, run them locally, and have enormous amounts of derived knowledge at my fingertips for the cost of some compute cycles. Except now it’s a “crime against humanity”?

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