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. testbjjl · 1789740596 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

         1. somenameforme · 1789741240 · focus · HN ↗

            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.

            1. TeMPOraL · 1789768786 · focus · HN ↗

               > 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

               I doubt it, those are the same group of people anyway.

               Orders of magnitude more people are using LLMs to brainstorm or generate content for them, which they are then using to solve their own problems and carry on with their life, increasingly solving many more problems for themselves this way, and not publishing any of it.

               The world isn't made of "content creators" flinging crap in hopes of monetizing it. Most people have actual jobs.

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