Thread

1. jacquesm · 1789726316 · focus · HN ↗

   It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.

   It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.

   1. TeMPOraL · 1789734845 · focus · HN ↗

      > 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".

      1. wjnc · 1789735359 · focus · HN ↗

         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.)

         1. mrngld · 1789736547 · focus · HN ↗

            [dead]

            1. TeMPOraL · 1789737142 · focus · HN ↗

               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!

               1. GlacierFox · 1789738106 · focus · HN ↗

                  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.

               2. AgentOrange1234 · 1789739066 · focus · HN ↗

                  "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.

                  1. WarmWash · 1789739606 · focus · HN ↗

                     >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.

                     1. jacquesm · 1789740787 · focus · HN ↗

                        Utilitarian arguments and ethics don't mix.

                        1. TeMPOraL · 1789765979 · focus · HN ↗

                           Sure they do. In fact, I'd tentatively claim that if you cannot easily find an utilitarian argument backing an ethical one, it's a good sign the ethical argument is some flawed ideology that will be used to justify suffering and control.

                           (Obvious caveat: utilitarian argument should not be some nonsense straw man that's narrow-scoped and ignores the time dimension.)

                     2. AgentOrange1234 · 1789752266 · focus · 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.

                        1. TeMPOraL · 1789766153 · focus · HN ↗

                           Right. But the neat things against current evolution of LLMs is that "open-weight" models are still tracking SOTA by 3-6 months, so even if all the commercial operators shut down access tomorrow, everyone would still have access to SOTA from half a year ago - which already is tremendously useful, very much in range of "saving $300 by telling you how to fix your toilet" - at the price of inference. That's because model weights are still just big bags of floating point numbers; once released, they cannot be unreleased.
               3. oefrha · 1789741877 · focus · HN ↗

                  [delayed]

                  1. TeMPOraL · 1789764498 · focus · HN ↗

                     The $200/mo version you're paying for today is the one that will be ~free for everyone in 6 months. You're only paying to use the bleeding edge of technology that improves so fast, and drops in costs so fast, that the entry-level free offering today is better than most expensive tier a year ago, and beyond science fiction just three years ago.

                     I swear most people dissing AI with such arguments must perpetually live in a moment and have zero concept of passage of time.

                     1. oefrha · 1789778042 · focus · HN ↗

                        [delayed]
               4. watwut · 1789743204 · focus · HN ↗

                  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.

               5. convolvatron · 1789743976 · focus · HN ↗

                  I'm anti IP in theory and practice. If this results in undermining vengeful protection of the Annas and the Schwartzs 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.

            2. qahr16 · 1789737458 · focus · HN ↗

               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.

            3. NateEag · 1789737656 · focus · HN ↗

               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?

               1. WarmWash · 1789739316 · focus · HN ↗

                  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.

                  1. NateEag · 1789784218 · focus · HN ↗

                     I don't think that holds at all.

                     There are so many variables that go into upvoting and downvoting, and we can't even see the actual scores on HN posts.

                     The data you refer to isn't available, AFAIK, and even if it were we'd have to account for the hundreds of confounding variables that contribute to post scores being what they are.

            4. tmcb · 1789738945 · focus · HN ↗

               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.

            5. duskdozer · 1789741465 · focus · HN ↗

               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.
            6. sham1 · 1789741732 · focus · HN ↗

               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?

            7. pbhjpbhj · 1789746102 · focus · HN ↗

               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.

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