> In a lot of ways, in fact, “AI” is just the newest iteration of a very old form of colonial capitalism; build a wall around something you didn’t create, call

> In a lot of ways, in fact, “AI” is just the newest iteration of a very old form of colonial capitalism; build a wall around something you didn’t create, call it yours, and charge for access. (And when the natives complain, call them primitive and argue they’re blocking inevitable progress.) This is pithy, but the dynamic between OSS devs and Microsoft/OpenAI is not exactly comparable to the dynamic between a colonial government and an indigenous population. I don’t think it really needs to be said, but open-source maintainers are not colonized natives. Even overlooking the very questionable metaphor, they’re not building a wall around existing repositories of code and selling them back to us. They spent a lot of money training an AI model on that code, and now they’re selling access to that model. You don’t need to pay Microsoft for access to the GitHub repos or Stack Overflow answers that they trained on.