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The problem is not AI bot scraping, per se, but "AI bot scraping while disregarding all licenses and ethical considerations". Freedom, the word, while implies

The problem is not AI bot scraping, per se, but "AI bot scraping while disregarding all licenses and ethical considerations". Freedom, the word, while implies no boundaries, is always bound by ethics, mutual respect and "do no harm" principle. The moment you trip either one of these wires and break them, the mechanisms to counter it becomes active. Then we cry "but, freedom?!". Freedom also contains the consequences of one's actions. Freedom without consequences is tyranny of the powerful.

tliltocatl 1y ago
The problem isn't "AI bot scraping while disregarding all licenses and ethical considerations". The problem is "AI bot scraping while ignoring every good practice to reduce bandwidth usage".
- bayindirh 1y ago
  If you ask me "every good practice to reduce bandwidth usage" falls under ethics pretty squarely, too. While this is certainly a problem, it's not the only problem.
wvenable 1y ago
> The problem is not AI bot scraping, per se, but "AI bot scraping while disregarding all licenses and ethical considerations". What licenses? Free and open web. Go crazy. What ethical considerations? Do I police how users use the information on my site? No. If they make a pipe bomb using an 6502 CPU using code taken from my website -- am I supposed to do something about that?
- bayindirh 1y ago
  Creative Commons, GFDL, Unlicense, GPL/AGPL, MIT, WTFPL. Go crazy. I have the freedom to police how users use the information on my site. Yes. Real examples: My blog is BY-NC-SA and digital garden is GFDL. You can't take them, mangle and sell them. Especially, the blog. AI companies take these posts, and sell derivatives, without any references, consent or compensation. BY-NC-SA is complete opposite of what they do. This is why I'm not uploading any photos I take publicly anymore.
  - wvenable 1y ago
    Absolutely. If you want to put all kinds of copyright, license, and even payment restrictions on your content go ahead. And if AI companies or people abuse that, that's bad on them. But I do think if you're serious about free and open information than why are you doing that in the first place? It's perfectly reasonable to be restrictive; I write both very open software and very closed software. But I see a lot of people want to straddle the line when it comes to AI without a rational argument.
    - bayindirh 1y ago
      Let me try to make my point as compact as possible. I may fail, but please bear with me. I prefer Free Software to Open Source software. My license of choice is A/GPLv3+. Because, I don't want my work to be used by people/entities in a single sided way. The software I put out is the software I develop for myself, with the hope of being useful for somebody else. My digital garden is the same. My blog is a personal diary in the open. These are built on my free time, for myself, and shared. See, permissive licenses are for "developer freedom". You can do whatever you do with what you can grab, as long as you write a line to credits. A/GPL family is different. Wants reciprocity. It empowers the user vs. the developer. You have to give the source. Who modifies the source, shares the modifications. It stays in the open. It has to stay open. I demand this reciprocity for what I put out there. The licenses reflect that. It's "restricting the use to keep the information/code open". I share something I spent my time on, and I want it to live on the open, want a little respect for putting out what I did. That respect is not fame or superiority. Just not take it and run with it, keeping all the improvements to yourself. It's not yours, but ours. You can't keep it to yourself. When it comes to AI, it's an extension of this thinking. I do not give consent to a faceless corporation to close, twist and earn money from what I put out for public good. I don't want a set of corporations act as a middleman to get what I put out, repackage and corrupt it in the process and sell it. It's not about money; it's about ethics, doing the right thing and being respectful. It's about exploitation. Same is applicable to my photos. I'm not against AI/LLM/Generative technology/etc. I'm against exploitation of people, artists, musicians, software developers, other companies. I equally get angry when a company's source available code is scraped and used for suggestions as well as an academic's LGPL high performance matrix library which is developed via grants over the years. This thing affect livelihoods of people. I get angry when people say "if we take permission for what we do, AI industry will collapse", or "this thing just learns like humans, this is fair use". I don't buy their "we're doing something awesome, we need no permission" attitude. No, you need permission to use my content. Because I say so. Read the fine print. I don't want knowledge to be monopolized by these corporations. I don't want the small fish to be eaten by the bigger one and what remains is buried into the depths of information ocean. This is why I stopped sharing my photos for now, and my latest research won't be open source for quite some time. What I put out is for humans' direct consumption. Middlemen are not welcome. If you have any questions or left any holes up there, please let me know.

tliltocatl 1y ago

The problem isn't "AI bot scraping while disregarding all licenses and ethical considerations". The problem is "AI bot scraping while ignoring every good practice to reduce bandwidth usage".

bayindirh 1y ago
If you ask me "every good practice to reduce bandwidth usage" falls under ethics pretty squarely, too. While this is certainly a problem, it's not the only problem.

wvenable 1y ago

> The problem is not AI bot scraping, per se, but "AI bot scraping while disregarding all licenses and ethical considerations". What licenses? Free and open web. Go crazy. What ethical considerations? Do I police how users use the information on my site? No. If they make a pipe bomb using an 6502 CPU using code taken from my website -- am I supposed to do something about that?

bayindirh 1y ago
Creative Commons, GFDL, Unlicense, GPL/AGPL, MIT, WTFPL. Go crazy. I have the freedom to police how users use the information on my site. Yes. Real examples: My blog is BY-NC-SA and digital garden is GFDL. You can't take them, mangle and sell them. Especially, the blog. AI companies take these posts, and sell derivatives, without any references, consent or compensation. BY-NC-SA is complete opposite of what they do. This is why I'm not uploading any photos I take publicly anymore.
- wvenable 1y ago
  Absolutely. If you want to put all kinds of copyright, license, and even payment restrictions on your content go ahead. And if AI companies or people abuse that, that's bad on them. But I do think if you're serious about free and open information than why are you doing that in the first place? It's perfectly reasonable to be restrictive; I write both very open software and very closed software. But I see a lot of people want to straddle the line when it comes to AI without a rational argument.
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    Let me try to make my point as compact as possible. I may fail, but please bear with me. I prefer Free Software to Open Source software. My license of choice is A/GPLv3+. Because, I don't want my work to be used by people/entities in a single sided way. The software I put out is the software I develop for myself, with the hope of being useful for somebody else. My digital garden is the same. My blog is a personal diary in the open. These are built on my free time, for myself, and shared. See, permissive licenses are for "developer freedom". You can do whatever you do with what you can grab, as long as you write a line to credits. A/GPL family is different. Wants reciprocity. It empowers the user vs. the developer. You have to give the source. Who modifies the source, shares the modifications. It stays in the open. It has to stay open. I demand this reciprocity for what I put out there. The licenses reflect that. It's "restricting the use to keep the information/code open". I share something I spent my time on, and I want it to live on the open, want a little respect for putting out what I did. That respect is not fame or superiority. Just not take it and run with it, keeping all the improvements to yourself. It's not yours, but ours. You can't keep it to yourself. When it comes to AI, it's an extension of this thinking. I do not give consent to a faceless corporation to close, twist and earn money from what I put out for public good. I don't want a set of corporations act as a middleman to get what I put out, repackage and corrupt it in the process and sell it. It's not about money; it's about ethics, doing the right thing and being respectful. It's about exploitation. Same is applicable to my photos. I'm not against AI/LLM/Generative technology/etc. I'm against exploitation of people, artists, musicians, software developers, other companies. I equally get angry when a company's source available code is scraped and used for suggestions as well as an academic's LGPL high performance matrix library which is developed via grants over the years. This thing affect livelihoods of people. I get angry when people say "if we take permission for what we do, AI industry will collapse", or "this thing just learns like humans, this is fair use". I don't buy their "we're doing something awesome, we need no permission" attitude. No, you need permission to use my content. Because I say so. Read the fine print. I don't want knowledge to be monopolized by these corporations. I don't want the small fish to be eaten by the bigger one and what remains is buried into the depths of information ocean. This is why I stopped sharing my photos for now, and my latest research won't be open source for quite some time. What I put out is for humans' direct consumption. Middlemen are not welcome. If you have any questions or left any holes up there, please let me know.