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.
None of your arguments hold any water if big-corpo AI restricts open-weight models - which they very clearly want to do. AI is NOT “the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world” if our only option is to pay a select few companies to use it.
But, rather that a wide Edenic expanse of communication, we seem headed toward walled gardens with gatekeepers and a need to pay money for all the usual reasons.
This seems both inevitable, and an occasion to tout the <a href="https://www.fsf.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.fsf.org
Eh? Where exactly is that a reality though? I just spent like 20$ last week on various Chinese frontier models using openrouter and ppq building like 10 different projects that would've cost way more than double or quadruple per token at the big 3 if I didn't have those alternative options. Hell, for small tasks I even fell back to a local 27b Qwen model.
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.
r053bud · · focus · HN ↗
SuperV1234 · · focus · HN ↗
smitty1e · · focus · HN ↗
This seems both inevitable, and an occasion to tout the <a href="https://www.fsf.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.fsf.org
jasonvorhe · · focus · HN ↗
hackmetothemoon · · focus · HN ↗
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