Thread

1. jamwise · 1790267785 · focus · HN ↗

   I have two issues with AI coding. The first is how giant trillion dollar companies are profiting off the accumulated labour of mostly open source developers who mostly offered their work for free. Open source had this pattern too but there was a kind of give and take that is not present here. The other is the atrophying of my own skills. That’s one of the reasons I don’t use it for my side projects since it’s become a requirement in my day job and I don’t want to forget how to code.

   This creates a grey area for things like a personal blog. If you’re not trying to maintain skills, yeah I wish we could avoid supporting these companies, but I can’t be a hypocrite seeing as I have to use them for work, and I use my provided account as a personal tutor to learn cool stuff.

   1. hackerbrother · 1790269179 · focus · HN ↗

      What’s wrong with using work offered for free?

      1. RIMR · 1790274941 · focus · HN ↗

         I feel like the standard "Free as in Gratis vs. Free as in Freedom" argument doesn't quite explain the issue people have here.

         Open-source code still had terms, and AI training was an unfortunate blind spot in those terms. If a human being learned how to code 100% from open-source code, nobody saw a problem if that person went on to write closed-source code.

         But it feels fundamentally different when the open-source code is just being fed into a machine that uses absurd amounts of processing until closed-source code comes out the other side. It feels like theft.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.