Are you sure about this?

An alternative near future is that what you're describing is used to undermine/rightswash strong copyleft free software for use in proprietary products, while owners of proprietary software (and big movie studios and record labels) start protecting themselves with EULAs forbidding ingestion of the works into LLMs.

Another possibility is the one others sketched, where truly user-controlled models are legislated away.

Do we really believe that Rockstar would be ok with someone feeding GTA6 to a hypothetical LLM and get a "free" reimplementation out? If that world were to come to fruition, I'd maybe buy the "best thing to happen to free software" story. Otherwise, my bets are on "complete and utter stomping of small IP rights holders in favor of giant ones". In that world, free software is in real trouble. Together with indie artists and writers. I lament how many people don't seem to take this scenario seriously.

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Pannoniae 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They can write any EULA they want but it's not like they will be able to enforce it in a meaningful way, to be fair. You can't legislate modding away, that's like legislating piracy away, which has famously failed. Music piracy wasn't killed by banning it, it has shrunk in importance because Spotify is fairly cheap and easy. Despite that, many people do still pirate music.

In the hypothetical GTA VI case, what can they do about it? Take just about any historical data leak, in pretty much zero cases anyone has been able to scrub all copies of it from the internet. There's plenty of lost media, the stuff no one cares about. But if enough people care about, it can't really be scrubbed away.

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gspr 16 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm so worried when the retort here is essentially "but nobody gets caught breaking the law". What have we become?

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Pannoniae 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Sorry, I'm just being realistic. "Whenever there's a will there's a way" and so on. People have tried to legislate all sorts of various things, even stuff like "PI = 3" without much success because they weren't viable.

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ButlerianJihad 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Fact Check: π != 3 https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alabamas-slice-of-pi/

[Usenet: talk.origins; 1 Apr 1998]

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gspr 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Don't be ridiculous. The fact that it's dumb to legislate mathematical falsehoods doesn't mean we can't successfully legislate things.

	▲	Pannoniae 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I said it's not possible to legislate some things away, i.e. unviable legislation. A hard ban on modding / AI reimplementation isn't viable, because you can't really keep data off the internet, evidenced by things like leaks, Anna's Archive etc. remaining online. People can always reupload the remade GTA or whatever onto noname fileshares, code forges, torrent and so on.

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mitxela 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Free software is already used in proprietary products and without any washing. Go and buy any phone and then try to get a copy of the source code of all the GPL software on it. The phone maker will just laugh at you all the way to the bank.

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gspr 13 hours ago | parent [-]

"The law isn't being properly enforced" is still way better than "let's ignore the law".

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mitxela 10 hours ago | parent [-]

The law is whatever gets enforced.

	▲	gspr 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is such a bad take. It really isn't. For example, an unenforced or poorly enforced law can at any moment start to be enforced. Or powers can threaten to enforce it to compel behavior. This is vastly different from a law that doesn't exist.