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.
An alternative near future is that what you're describing is used to undermine/rightswash strong copyleft free software for use in proprietary products, while owners of proprietary software (and big movie studios and record labels) start protecting themselves with EULAs forbidding ingestion of the works into LLMs.
Another possibility is the one others sketched, where truly user-controlled models are legislated away.
Do we really believe that Rockstar would be ok with someone feeding GTA6 to a hypothetical LLM and get a "free" reimplementation out? If that world were to come to fruition, I'd maybe buy the "best thing to happen to free software" story. Otherwise, my bets are on "complete and utter stomping of small IP rights holders in favor of giant ones". In that world, free software is in real trouble. Together with indie artists and writers. I lament how many people don't seem to take this scenario seriously.
They can write any EULA they want but it's not like they will be able to enforce it in a meaningful way, to be fair. You can't legislate modding away, that's like legislating piracy away, which has famously failed. Music piracy wasn't killed by banning it, it has shrunk in importance because Spotify is fairly cheap and easy. Despite that, many people do still pirate music.
In the hypothetical GTA VI case, what can they do about it? Take just about any historical data leak, in pretty much zero cases anyone has been able to scrub all copies of it from the internet. There's plenty of lost media, the stuff no one cares about. But if enough people care about, it can't really be scrubbed away.
Sorry, I'm just being realistic. "Whenever there's a will there's a way" and so on. People have tried to legislate all sorts of various things, even stuff like "PI = 3" without much success because they weren't viable.
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.
gspr · · focus · HN ↗
An alternative near future is that what you're describing is used to undermine/rightswash strong copyleft free software for use in proprietary products, while owners of proprietary software (and big movie studios and record labels) start protecting themselves with EULAs forbidding ingestion of the works into LLMs.
Another possibility is the one others sketched, where truly user-controlled models are legislated away.
Do we really believe that Rockstar would be ok with someone feeding GTA6 to a hypothetical LLM and get a "free" reimplementation out? If that world were to come to fruition, I'd maybe buy the "best thing to happen to free software" story. Otherwise, my bets are on "complete and utter stomping of small IP rights holders in favor of giant ones". In that world, free software is in real trouble. Together with indie artists and writers. I lament how many people don't seem to take this scenario seriously.
Pannoniae · · focus · HN ↗
In the hypothetical GTA VI case, what can they do about it? Take just about any historical data leak, in pretty much zero cases anyone has been able to scrub all copies of it from the internet. There's plenty of lost media, the stuff no one cares about. But if enough people care about, it can't really be scrubbed away.
gspr · · focus · HN ↗
Pannoniae · · focus · HN ↗
ButlerianJihad · · focus · HN ↗
[Usenet: talk.origins; 1 Apr 1998]