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?
Yeah, S-curve should be classified as fallacy, because it rarely covers what people argue it does.
Economic and technological growth is a stack of S-curves, where one very specific facet may hit limits and taper off, only for equivalent, complementary or alternative facet to take off in its place. Added up, there's no sign of the exponent stopping any time soon, not until hitting real limits, or (probably more likely) some general catastrophy that shuts down human civilization.
> 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.
> EDIT: The reason I am comparing chip computation to human-power is because the authors of those digital works intended their works to only be read by humans. Not by some alien species (even if it be made of silicon) that incorporated their work into producing models.
News to me. That would be incredibly xenophobic of them if they did, and deserves to be called out.
> News to me. That would be incredibly xenophobic of them if they did, and deserves to be called out.
What do you mean? Xenophobia does not mean what you think it means, especially so in this context. Also, every creator/producer of content has rights on who/what has access to his/her produced work. It is not xenophobia. And it is definitely not xenophobic to call out stealing of copyrighted works.
EDIT: Let me clarify this further. A recent court ruling (in US) established that ONLY humans can be authors of copyrightable works. As a consequence of that assertion, it can be safely concluded that consumers of the copyrightable work MUST ONLY be humans as well. Else it would be, using your own words, "xenophobic" against humans to have their copyrightable works be consumed by any species (other than humans) while the reverse is not recognized by Law.
> A recent court ruling (in US) established that ONLY humans can be authors of copyrightable works. As a consequence of that assertion, it can be safely concluded that consumers of the copyrightable work MUST ONLY be humans as well.
"United States copyright law protects only works of human creation". That means the source of creation of any work has to be from a human being for it to be copyrightable. Machine-generated output is not copyrightable and is public domain by default. If you, for example, use Claude to generate code for you, for any project (be it private or public), it is automatically public domain and you have no way to claim copyright over that generated work. It can be used by anyone (including the AI provider) to further train models or heck duplicate your work with zero consequences. So it is a violation of primary producer of copyright work (which was used in training models) as neither was he/she compensated for use of the work, but subsequent derivations (generated work) even strip of his/her legal protections as guaranteed by Constitution of various countries (in US copyright law applies only to human beings). So naturally it follows that copyrightable work can only be consumed by humans. Machine-generated code is not on the same footing. It is violating copyright law.
Moreover, it's the people/companies from RIAA and adjacent circles (news publishing) that are stoking the "AI training is theft" arguments that people here are so breathlessly repeating - in a twist of irony, it's the people that suddenly decided to align themselves with media/news conglomerates, the same ones that were considered scum of the Earth before ChatGPT debuted.
> 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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
All of the powers granted to the government are through the constitution, and copyright is a form of property right... hence the phrase "intellectual property".
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.
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?
There are two injustices here. The first injustice is the sheer existence of this notion of intellectual property. The second injustice stems from the selective application of the associated laws.
Intellectual property should not exist, but since it does, one can and should expect it to be applied consistently in all cases. Just look at what they did to Kim Dotcom, he basically got destroyed. SWAT rappelled down helicopters and descended upon this guy for the egregious crime of copying bits. That's exactly what should happen to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta. Anything less than that is an insult to previous enforcement victims.
Inconsistency robs authorities of all credibility. Selective enforcement exposes them for the arbitrary tyrants they are and delegitimizes their decisions.
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.
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).
> Lincoln went on to further prove there is no divine power enforcing these rights,
This is a straw man that nobody is arguing.
> Now, we can say things like "well, you can't concentrate information"
Again, nobody is arguing that "concentrating information" is bad. They're arguing that the expression of ideas in a specific format is a type of property, and that what AI companies are doing is immoral theft. Further, states and the federal government have the means and impetus to prosecute theft according to the powers given them by the Constitution. The only thing that is stopping them from doing so is that the claim that theft has occurred is contested, and the method in question has not been successfully tried in court in the broad.
"A social construct" and "not real" are not the same thing. Money, laws, countries, gender, even civilization itself are all social constructs. More importantly, all forms of ownership are social constructs, and that doesn't provide any information as to whether we should respect them or not.
> 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.
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
that seems very anti-social and immature, like throwing a tantrum. you get a singular downvote from me for one comment but I do like how reasonable you're being about all of it :)
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.
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.
Compared to feral dogs, quite wealthy indeed. They've claimed sleeping and feeding spots that are very valuable for being both safe and climate controlled, and have a number of chew bones and toys that are free of dangerous splintering wood, animal bone, parasites and fleas. These are things that are valuable enough to fight over and will contribute greatly to their lifespan.
If you think the only measure of wealth is money, you have it backwards- money is a polite fiction representing an abstraction of value, and is only good for use as an exchange into another more concrete form of value.
> 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).
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”.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Yes, and we lived in a world of guilds, Orders and secrets which kept their knowledge tightly within themselves.
Music and art was created by patronage. Entire periods o where the art that mattered was made by the powers that moved the world.
For my whole life the goal was to move away from that era, not to see it recreated.
Also, this is a debate that English speakers can enjoy on a website for an US based accelerator. Most of humanity doesn’t even have the standing to be heard in this conversation.
> 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.
Copies are not rivalrous, but the underlying creativity absolutely is. If I pay someone to draw a picture, that's labor, and they've got a finite number of hours to sell. Except it's also very inconvenient to pay for creative works this way: drawings and artists are not fungible with one another. More importantly, quality and desirability of the work is incredibly variable. The buyer of the art is bearing the risk of the art being bad.
What copyright lets you do[1] is offload that risk onto a publisher[0]. Instead of having to pay to commission every piece of art, a publisher can do that, and then sell the now-monopolized copies of whatever art turns out to actually be valuable.
A lot of hay was made during the Piracy Wars over filesharing tools breaking this bargain. A bunch of data hoarders with an interest in sharing media made it possible to just get the shit for free. This created a social dynamic where artists were annoyed about it, but publishers were Fucking Pissed. You could even measure how publisher-brained an artist got by how angry they were over Napster[2].
AI generated art also breaks this bargain, by making creative labor nearly non-rivalrous. The only cost is electricity and GPUs. This has created nearly the opposite reaction: artists are pissed while publishers don't care, because AI is to publishers like tort reform is to insurance companies. A publisher that gets art for free doesn't care if everyone else has it, because they have the payola dividend: they can push whatever slop they want onto the market and the market will eat it because they're big and powerful.
> This concept exists to prevent violent conflict over non-shareables and to prevent the tragedy of the commons
The copyright maximalists would argue that free reuse of creative works is a tragedy of the commons. I certainly remember hearing that phrase bandied about a lot during the Piracy Wars.
It's also important to note that "tragedy of the commons" is not a natural law, but a specific framing that is used to justify antisocial ends. The communal ownership so decried worked perfectly well in England for hundreds of years until the ruling classes found it inconvenient and abolished it. The kind of ecological collapse the tragedy attempts to invoke did not happen because there were already communal means of preventing overuse of the land. In fact, an emissions market is probably closer to communal management than enclosure.
Also none of this changes the underlying logic that AI companies are trying to enclose the intellectual commons, and that their business model relies on being able to replace human brains with machine intelligence they can rent out by the megatoken.
[0] Individuals who self-publish included.
[1] To be clear, copyright was created as a censorship regime, it just happens to be useful for other things.
[2] In Lars Ulrich's defense, they weren't just angry that Metallica songs were on Napster, they were specifically angry that Napster had their latest album before it was in stores.
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.
Well, no, the physical laws aren't social. An apple falls whether there is a social group to see it or not.
And yes! Animals are a perfect example. Mother Nature came up with a nice strategy for maximal benefit in a social group, and she encoded it in our instincts and intuitions.
But that doesn't mean it's perfect. I have an instinctual fear of fire - but it's still better to cook my own food.
IP could be real and LLM training could be considered fair use. IP protects published information, so even abolishing all IP would not help us since the LLM weights are secret.
Nothing short of a global revolution can fix this. Proprietary LLMs should be illegal. Either we achieve post scarcity within this generation or it's literally over.
> The status quo of "your knowledge has no protection, but our knowledge is sacred" is the worst of all possible worlds.
This is how IP has always worked. It has never protected the little guy. Draw a picture and then people start putting it on t-shirts and posters without paying you? Great, you can't do anything about it unless you have enough time and money to hire a lawyer to go after them. Self publish a book and then people start uploading PDFs of it? Better hope your real passion is filing takedown requests instead of writing.
AI scraping for the goal of making a commercial LLM service is different from, say, a commercial file sharing platform.
The first difference is that LLM training is highly transformative. Let's say your LLM ingests the Harry Potter novels during its training. What you get at the other end is not the Harry Potter novels, it is a LLM that can talk to you about Harry Potter, it is not the same thing, and going from one to the other requires a significant amount of work, very expensive work in this case.
Not only that but there is no direct competition. People won't stop buying the Harry Potter novels because a LLM trained on it exists. If you want to read the books, you buy the books, you don't ask a LLM about it. A file sharing service on the other hand competes directly against the official channels, if you want to read the books, you can download it from this service instead of buying it on the official channels.
So, about how free you should be to get these weights from the AI companies. If you just share a 1:1 copy of the weights, that's the "file sharing" situation, not transformative, you took their work, didn't do any of your own. Usually considered unacceptable by IP laws.
Distillation is a more interesting case, you are using a LLM to train your own, it is transformative work, but you may also be competing directly against the LLM you are distilling. So, in a sense it is worse than scraping, but still, despite how much the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic are complaining, it seems to be legal.
So it is somewhat consistent: 1:1 copy and distribution is not allowed, be it source material or LLM weights, and training is, be it source material or another LLM (as in distillation).
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.
> 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? They tried to argue that the books couldn’t be trained on at all. It failed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
And by constructing that false dichotomy, you're failing to see the actual truth, which is that Intellectual Property is just a legal construct to turn ideas into Capital, with the goal of incentivizing its creation.
Nothing more and nothing less, and all of the normal debates about what should remain Capital and what should be The Commons apply.
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.
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.
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.
> reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West.
I think this is quite the pollyannaish perspective and very much inline with those that think if you can take, then take and only apologize when caught.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
>> 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.
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.
> 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?
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).
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).
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".
> 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 living on 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.
Item 2 is the big one. Because not only is AI about to destroy jobs wholesale; it's doing so in an environment that abhors wealth and income redistribution that could blunt the harms.
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.
And this is fuel for climate change denial. See? Are the wealthy and powerful people acting like they are concerned about the climate? No. They are doubling down on energy use and consumption. It's all a fraud!
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
I'm thinking more of a future where big tech successfully moves the overton window for AI, people gradually rely on getting information/entertainment from LLM's more than books, then it can follow the regular plotline of 451 with the public voting to ban books.
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.
> it's not a "can" argument, it's a "should" argument.
When you take a pitchfork against all the libraries out there who either refuse donations, or destroy the donated books, then we'll talk.
As plenty of people have pointed out, no one has shown that anything of value has really been lost. Either the works are still available for you to obtain (i.e. they didn't destroy the last version), or they are things no one wanted.
And while it hasn't come up in this thread, it was the last time it was discussed: These companies are legally obligated to destroy the books. It is illegal to scan the book, keep the scanned copy, and sell/donate the physical books. If you don't like that, change copyright law.
"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.
They have no more right to destroy cultural artifacts than you do. It's a red herring, as no one has demonstrated a single loss of a cultural artifact. What was destroyed, that satisfies:
1. You cannot obtain elsewhere
2. That anyone cares about
Destroying a copy of a Harry Potter is not a loss of a cultural artifact if I can still buy the book at a store.
Go ahead and start a campaign: For all who are upset by this, list your physical address, and tell everyone to mail their unwanted books to those on the list instead of destroying them.
The catch is the recipients are not allowed to destroy them. Then we'll see how much those complaining value culture.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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 ?
> 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"
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.
> 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.
By your reasoning, if I could afford to buy every surviving painting by Van Gogh and Rembrandt and I burned them in a bon fire I wouldn't be taking anything from human culture and nobody should care at all about what I do with my belongings.
Destroying something that is rare or one of a kind and valuable does matter. Doing it so that you can exclusively profit off of charging people for software that regurgitates lossy and error filled versions of what was lost makes it even worse.
In your scenario, the bug is letting someone control all of that in a private collection. But that scenario is completely divorced from what is actually happening, so I don't think it's worth discussing too deeply here.
If you actually object to the concept that people that own a physical object get to decide how to dispose of it, that would be an interesting discussion to have because it would fly in the face of property ownership rights.
> There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"
If I do something destructive to my copy of Accelerate -- feed it through a scanner, leave it where the munchkin can reach, whatever -- that does nothing to deprive you of your copy. Books are funny like that; there tend to be lots of identical ones.
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.
> 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.
> because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses.
Not problems, laziness. The way I see students and colleagues use it is to get their work done with less effort. That's its selling point. There are not many real problems LLMs address.
> no one has actually been robbed
In our society, people get paid for work. If you think society is wrong, fine, but you must state so first. Under common assumptions, all that data has been produced through work, and that work represents value. Taking it for free is therefore theft.
> 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?
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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 *
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.
"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.
>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.
It's good pushback and you're right to call that out.
I think consolidation and centralized control are coming fast. Already some models are "too dangerous" to let everyone use, competition from open-weight models are being targeted as "lacking safety," distillation is under attack as "cheating," opting out of data sharing is now an enterprise-only feature, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
reified intelligence on a chip, almost too cheap to meter,
“Reified intelligence” is stretching the truth. It is certainly closer to intelligence than anything we’ve come up with before, it can certainly match or beat actual intelligence in some domains, but just as certainly it clearly lacks many features and capabilities of intelligence.
“On a chip” is also stretching the truth. The kinds of models that you might point to in support of “reified intelligence” run on things the size of a desktop computer and cost more than a car, which is way off from the scale that “on a chip” suggests.
And “almost too cheap to meter” is aggressively false. Users of this service are known to talk incessantly about being metered, it is a daily fact of life for them. Individuals who have free usage for a project commonly report that, had they paid, it would cost five or six figures. Companies have seen enormous bills, some approaching the size of their payroll. And all of this is true for tokens that are dramatically subsidized, by one of the most intense and largest concentrations of capital in history. It is the polar opposite - “almost too expensive to even do, and absolutely must be carefully metered”.
In summary, let us indeed not forget what we got back for this: extraordinary distortions of reality evenly intermingled with bald-faced lies.
>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?
I have artist friends - asking AI to draw something similar to subjects they've drawn ends up making, line for line, the exact image they created, hallucinated alongside a couple others. They spent decades getting good at their craft. They spent so many years getting paying patrons and customers to commission them.
You'll never agree but I think you underestimate how many people consider all that the AI companies have done to be the wealthy stealing and selling things back.
> nor are the people involved selling it back in any form
I am convinced that the longer one works in AI the less one has any grasp on reality
> too cheap to meter
Its the most expensive buildout in human history - you can't just split half the cost. The spending is the only significant growth in the US economy. Unless you think that all the datacenters and all that capex are for training?
I have horse & wagon friends - they spent decades understanding the ins and outs of roads, some of them also creatively made up their own routes and roads.
However ordering a car with Uber through your phone just gets people to the destination faster, cheaper, more comfortably and reliably using those same roads.
Stealing in this case is not about physically removing something from one's possessions, but more about disguising attribution and in many cases also reducing a future income stream.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen
I respectfully request that you get all the way outta here with this take.
Artists have caught AI generating literally their own work, for free, at scale. There have been tons of articles on this website about the AI hyperscalers slurping up books, copyrighted works, etc through legal and questionable ways. Even TFA says that the NYT suffered absolutely devastating CTR drops.
If you create a blog post about something super esoteric, it will guaranteed end up in the training sets for every big-lab frontier model within 24 hours (probably less) and probably show up in Google's AI Summaries at around the same time. It's also well-documented that their spiders don't honor robots.txt either and blocking them is basically impossible unless you give Cloudflare protection money (since spiders can super easily solve Anubis hashing challenges).
If that doesn't sound like theft-as-a-service to you, I don't know what to tell you. All I know is that hosting content ANYWHERE AI labs can get a hold of it is rapidly becoming a fool's errand, and we will all be at a loss for it.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there
It's actually not there. See how many websites have now closed doors or ceased to operate because of constantly being hammered and bombarded by robotic scrapers. For others, it made websites that turned a small profit into unsustainable money pits.
Sure, their content might now be ingested into an LLM training set sitting somewhere on proprietary servers. But the site itself (the origin of truth) now does not exist.
So no. It actually isn't there. Resting on this falsehood, the rest of your retort makes not much sense.
> 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.
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."
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.
It's more than thousands, and not only it's not reasonable, it's not possible.
Plenty of games run on some critical optimizations that exploit native code quirks that may or may not hold up only because Windows papers over them by special-casing the game process at OS level. The source of such games may be stuck in IP limbo, with five different studios/companies claiming ownership (three of them dead or bankrupt), and even then, the only person who knows what and how needs to be reimplemented is on a remote tropical island, working for a competitor / happily retired / stuck collecting trash for a living, depending on how their career went.
Takes only a few such cases to turn out to be some well-known games with substantial legacy fanbase hoping to relive some childhood memories, to risk seriously damaging the "supporting everything" marketing angle.
Emulating underlying runtime is safer and more practical choice.
Your message seems to be arguing both points at the same time - at least that's how it reads to me; first, that it's absolutely feasible to do this because Android did, and then, that in reality game developers there casually defeated those efforts anyway.
Apples and apple seeds to me. The way I see it, the thermostat contains the motor (EDIT deleted the rest of explanation).
EDIT: the way I see it, talking about gradients here is nonsense. The wax motor works by expansion/contraction due to point temperature. No gradient is involved. Gradients are thermostat-level thinking, and even then, in the greenhouse scenario, there is no gradient to talk about, because the whole point is just to vent the heat from inside to outside when inside crosses certain absolute value of T, and the only "gradient" that matters is the assumption that outside side is less than T at all times.
You're skipping any causal connection between the "as greater and greater" and "anybody would be motivated" parts. What is it in "excessive generative AI output" that "devalues all communication media"?
Not that I disagree much, but for myself I have an actual cause connecting the two parts, and it's not something inherent to AI.
Basically, synthetic content is like those fancy desserts - they look nice and the top layer possibly has an exquisite flavor (probably on purpose), but once you cut deeper, it's some weird fruit or nut or other foodstuff that belongs next to potatoes and meat, not in a cake. So I learned to avoid such desserts and stick to basic stuff I know are good entirely, like IDK a cream pie or cream-filled chocolate stuff or such.
Same is with content. My problem isn't that it's AI, but that it's wrong, full of mistakes human authors don't make. Hallucinations mid-text that make half of it convincingly argue bullshit. Or the uncanny or repetitive factor in art that kicks in after few seconds of looking.
Like with desert, I'm avoiding disappointment and wasted hopes. When synthetic context gets better, I'll be consuming it just like "vanilla" one, for the same reasons.
Execution trumps ideas, impact trumps raw effort, and such. Isn't this the entrepreneurial narrative?
reply