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The alarmism in this thread is misguided. By advocating for excluding copyrighted works from LLM training, you are advocating an expansion of copyright protecti

The alarmism in this thread is misguided. By advocating for excluding copyrighted works from LLM training, you are advocating an expansion of copyright protection. This attitude is opposite my understanding pf the hacker ethos.

AshamedCaptain 2y ago
Go tell that to most "viral" copyleft licenses, as they rely on copyright to enforce the viral parts.
- hn_acker 2y ago
  That's fine. There's no need to expand copyright for the sake of preserving copyleft licenses (and in my fantasy world some country could explicitly leave copyright protection the same for free culture licenses while weakening copyright protection for proprietary licenses). If copyright gets weakened then the effective strengthening of the public domain (or fair use as well / instead in the US) will make up for the effective weakening of copyleft.
  - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
    I really don't see that. What will happen is fights between those who have the most resources to commit to copy-protection schemes where users and developers will always lose. There will be zero free software (in either definition of the word "free") voluntarily published because it will be immediately assimilated into big corporation's big codebases and nothing will ever be given back.
forgetfulness 2y ago
The hacker ethos is a pretty old concept that hasn't been written all that much about much since the early 2000s except by Paul Graham, and that's precisely the sort of "suit" association that the old hacker ethos antagonized, so the concept lost luster. Regardless, the old hacker ethos was very much about individuals creating and disseminating knowledge to empower other individuals, copyright was derided when it got in the way of that. What does OpenAI do? It uses knowledge to disempower the individuals holding it and sharing it, and giving it to themselves to sell to companies and create power dynamics that are extremely un-hacker-like. Now knowledge has less power to set you free from the monetary or coercive power of the suits and the Government.
- seizethecheese 2y ago
  ChatGPT definitely empowers individuals. What a convoluted argument.
  - kombookcha 2y ago
    Does it? It hasn't enriched my personal or professional life. I just have to kick my way through a bunch of AI slop on the daily now. It's been a net negative on signal-to-noise in every arena I can think of.

AshamedCaptain 2y ago

Go tell that to most "viral" copyleft licenses, as they rely on copyright to enforce the viral parts.

hn_acker 2y ago
That's fine. There's no need to expand copyright for the sake of preserving copyleft licenses (and in my fantasy world some country could explicitly leave copyright protection the same for free culture licenses while weakening copyright protection for proprietary licenses). If copyright gets weakened then the effective strengthening of the public domain (or fair use as well / instead in the US) will make up for the effective weakening of copyleft.
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago
  I really don't see that. What will happen is fights between those who have the most resources to commit to copy-protection schemes where users and developers will always lose. There will be zero free software (in either definition of the word "free") voluntarily published because it will be immediately assimilated into big corporation's big codebases and nothing will ever be given back.

forgetfulness 2y ago

The hacker ethos is a pretty old concept that hasn't been written all that much about much since the early 2000s except by Paul Graham, and that's precisely the sort of "suit" association that the old hacker ethos antagonized, so the concept lost luster. Regardless, the old hacker ethos was very much about individuals creating and disseminating knowledge to empower other individuals, copyright was derided when it got in the way of that. What does OpenAI do? It uses knowledge to disempower the individuals holding it and sharing it, and giving it to themselves to sell to companies and create power dynamics that are extremely un-hacker-like. Now knowledge has less power to set you free from the monetary or coercive power of the suits and the Government.

seizethecheese 2y ago
ChatGPT definitely empowers individuals. What a convoluted argument.
- kombookcha 2y ago
  Does it? It hasn't enriched my personal or professional life. I just have to kick my way through a bunch of AI slop on the daily now. It's been a net negative on signal-to-noise in every arena I can think of.