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. 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. 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.

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