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. tripzilch · 1789735540 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

         Some things already got lost.

         1. TeMPOraL · 1789736551 · focus · HN ↗

            That's people problems though, namely:

            1) Lazy peers, and

            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.

            But that's all off-topic for this thread anyway.

            1. gwbas1c · 1789738879 · focus · HN ↗

               > 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.

               1. 3ash87 · 1789739379 · focus · HN ↗

                  [dead]

                  1. shimman · 1789740299 · focus · HN ↗

                     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.

                     1. iu123 · 1789741189 · focus · HN ↗

                        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?

                        The comment was clearly satirical.

                        1. shimman · 1789741367 · focus · HN ↗

                           Nah, some tech people really believe this. You need to get out of your bubble and realize a nontrivial percentage of tech workers are very anti-human.
                        2. gwbas1c · 1789746633 · focus · HN ↗

                           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.

            2. shepardrtc · 1789738978 · focus · HN ↗

               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.

               1. 3ash87 · 1789739440 · focus · HN ↗

                  IT HELPS THE TRILLIONAIRES YOU MORON.
               2. Retric · 1789739948 · focus · HN ↗

                  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.

               3. antihipocrat · 1789741474 · focus · HN ↗

                  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.

               4. latexr · 1789744985 · focus · HN ↗

                  > is not something I quite understand

                  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?

               5. nz · 1789746435 · focus · HN ↗

                  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).

               6. tripzilch · 1789816894 · focus · HN ↗

                  First of you're framing the conversation here by assuming we're talking about "free software" (according to whichever definition).

                  There's people saying they'd rather talk to an LLM than to me.

                  I dunno how else to say it to you, but when somebody happily announces that they'd rather talk to a computer than to you, and they are happy this is the future.

                  That carries certain connotations beyond "external validation".

                  The person in the top of this thread was claiming "nobody has been robbed".

                  There's people in these communities that I will never have an intelligent conversation with, again.

                  I'm not talking about being able to pay bills or anything, I'm just talking about being replaced by a computer program, in a social sense.

            3. latexr · 1789744164 · focus · HN ↗

               > That's people problems though

               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.

               ¹ Sounds like the name of a Rob Zombie associate.

            4. tripzilch · 1789816441 · focus · HN ↗

               It's not only off-topic, there's also no reason to be so harsh about groups of people, communities, scenes and entire industries you clearly have no idea of, or how they even work.

               The world is bigger than your weird, entitled view.

               You basically just told everyone that the existence of the demoscene "irks" you. And you consider this being "irked" somehow more relevant than these actual communities being torn apart by the existence of LLMs.

               Oh no you called it "unfair gains", unfair according to those rules??

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