100% this.

And frankly, I think most of the source of outrage is this:

> Yeah on the one hand opening your code got you credit which was nice for the ego and for getting paid, and AI trains on it and doesn't give credit where it's due.

Turns out, a lot of people didn't really do things in the open to benefit the others, in pay-it-forward style. They just did it for selfish gains. Which is fine, just like keeping source closed and selling licenses is fine. The problem is with lying - doing something for personal gain, while claiming it's for greater good, thus getting more gains through dishonesty.

LLMs just shone a light onto it. People who had betterment of others on their minds, don't have a reason to consider LLMs training on their output as taking anything from them. On the contrary, their outputs now contribute to a general-purpose problem solving tool that will (and already does) help humanity with way more problems that anyone imagined.

I personally am more than happy to know LLMs may have trained on my content. I don't begrudge the companies the $0.000001/year they probably owe me for my relative contributions. I get orders of magnitude more value for myself from LLMs every day, in my personal life alone.

There are other reasons to dislike LLMs and fear or hate what AI is doing to the world. But people who feel something was "stolen" from them, who now close their blogs and turns repos private because LLMs - they're just showing they had ulterior motives for their work - which again, is fine if they were up-front about it. The OSS subset of those, just paint themselves as being grifters all along.

> There are other reasons to dislike LLMs and fear or hate what AI is doing to the world. But people who feel something was "stolen" from them, who now close their blogs and turns repos private because LLMs - they're just showing they had ulterior motives for their work - which again, is fine if they were up-front about it.

100% this. Why should I be bothered that some of my work that I released freely to the world is now potentially used by millions of people as a small part of the knowledge in a state of the art AI system? I am honored!

But I guess some people just have different motivations for releasing their code, and require explicit attribution to feel honored enough to make it all worth it for them. Not me, though.

You have no proof that the world will be a better place because of this stuff but there is plenty of proof already that it will be worse, possibly significantly worse but the jury is still out on that.

> Turns out, a lot of people didn't really do things in the open to benefit the others, in pay-it-forward style. They just did it for selfish gains. Which is fine, just like keeping source closed and selling licenses is fine. The problem is with lying - doing something for personal gain, while claiming it's for greater good, thus getting more gains through dishonesty.

> There are other reasons to dislike LLMs and fear or hate what AI is doing to the world. But people who feel something was "stolen" from them, who now close their blogs and turns repos private because LLMs - they're just showing they had ulterior motives for their work - which again, is fine if they were up-front about it. The OSS subset of those, just paint themselves as being grifters all along.

thank you for putting such clear words to a feeling that's been troubling me about this outrage for a long time.

it's not selfish to want attribution for your work and knowledge, it's an essential human trait