I really don't get those takes. AI is the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world, it is basically turning any software into Free Software. You can just throw file formats, protocols or even plain binaries at the AI and it'll reverse engineer everything in a pinch. Users can finally modify software themselves, which was always the goal of the Free Software world, but very rarely happened in actuality, since it was just so damn complicated. AI lowered the barrier of entry tremendously, not just in terms of required knowledge, but especially time. Same with Creative Commons, sharing art and stuff, was a nice gesture, but rarely useful, since the level of work to modify a work to fit your project was pretty close to just doing it from scratch anyway. With AI everybody can toy around with image generators and get what they want.
Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified. We finally have computer we can interact with in natural language, something people tried to do for at least 70 years and never made any significant progress on until LLM arrived.
If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain.
It's not a real problem. It's one of the most honest business models currently employed by tech companies - simple exchange of money for value. Training wasn't free and only few players on the planet had enough capital to perform it. Serving isn't free, it costs electricity (and maintenance). The companies that trained the models, and companies that serve inference, have all created real value at their own expense, and they're (for now) charging very little for it. The value users get from inference - that no one is even capturing right now, it's literally left on the table and goes 100% to the users.
Contrast that with most other businesses - tech or otherwise - where there's always strings and trickery attached to any transaction.
So the material trained on has no value, but all other costs associate with ai should be captured by business? I mean we coders released it, and it’s hard to compensate everyone, but the world would be better if some open source projects got funded. They don’t even get a source footnote.
Does anyone trust Ai companies not to eventually spy on you and feed you ads? It’s not like we haven’t seen this playbook before.
I don't trust any company, AI or otherwise. Business is business, companies are only nice while margins are good.
I'm commenting on how things are now, not how they may turn out at some point in the future. This is in response to complains that are also mostly about now, not about hypothetical.
WRT LLMs in particular, open-weight models offset the risk a lot. As long as they track SOTA by couple months, that's the most we lose in capability should the commercial vendors start to enshittify their inference services.
grumbel · · focus · HN ↗
Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified. We finally have computer we can interact with in natural language, something people tried to do for at least 70 years and never made any significant progress on until LLM arrived.
If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain.
ssl232 · · focus · HN ↗
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
Contrast that with most other businesses - tech or otherwise - where there's always strings and trickery attached to any transaction.
acomjean · · focus · HN ↗
Does anyone trust Ai companies not to eventually spy on you and feed you ads? It’s not like we haven’t seen this playbook before.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
I'm commenting on how things are now, not how they may turn out at some point in the future. This is in response to complains that are also mostly about now, not about hypothetical.
WRT LLMs in particular, open-weight models offset the risk a lot. As long as they track SOTA by couple months, that's the most we lose in capability should the commercial vendors start to enshittify their inference services.