6 ms·

I'm old enough to remember a time when the primary hacker cause was DRM, the DMCA, patent trolls, export controls for PGP, etc. All things that made it difficu

I'm old enough to remember a time when the primary hacker cause was DRM, the DMCA, patent trolls, export controls for PGP, etc. All things that made it difficult to use information when you want to. "Information wants to be free." It's wild to see the about face. Now it's: > If [companies] can’t source training data ethically, then I see absolutely no reason why any website operator should make it easy for them to steal it. It would have been very difficult to predict this shift 25 years ago.

noosphr 6mo ago
This is what happens when a culture doesn't have robust exclusionary mechanisms for people who want to burn it down. We welcomed the vampires in and wonder why our necks hurt.
- ryandrake 6mo ago
  This is like saying Winner Take All Capitalism doesn't have an exclusionary mechanism for the rich. The system exists for the sole purpose of serving the already-rich. The vampires are an inevitability baked into the system from the start.
  - noosphr 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - jordanb 6mo ago
      Disney is all-in on AI. They are thrilled. The folks fighting perpetual copyright were not fighting to make it possible for Disney to fire creatives. In fact they were fighting for the creatives to triumph over Disney.
      - noosphr 6mo ago
        Disney is all in because all their characters are entering the public domain over the next 5 years. They can't fight like it's 1998 because youtube is now worth more than they are. > In fact they were fighting for the creatives to triumph over Disney. We were doing nothing of the sort. It was "Information wants to be free" not "we want to provide a perpetual job for a subset white collar workers". sprinkles holy water
        jordanb 6mo ago
        Well I was in that cohort and none of us were thinking we were helping megacorps create the content slop machine from 1984. Our concern was that corporations were expanding the definition of intellectual property to the extent where you couldn't make a movie or song or write a book as an individual without some corporation with a massive "IP" warchest coming after you and declaring it derivative. You couldn't write some software without a corporation with a massive repository of junk patents claiming you infringe. We wanted to insure that individual creators could continue to have a voice, and not get sued out of existence by an IP Legal/Industrial Complex that was forming causing arms races between megacorps and SLAPs against everyone else. If we knew we were feeding a yet-to-be-invented slop machine that would allow megacorps to unemploy all the creatives, most of us would not have supported that. And by the way Disney is all in on AI for the same reason they were all in on perpetual copyright. In the perpetual copyright world, having a massive library of content you no longer have to pay residuals on was a source of massive amounts of "free" revenue. You could just keep re-releasing and re-making stuff. You did not have to do the messy, expensive work of paying people to come up with really good new stuff. In the AI world, the money-printing capital asset is the trained model that grinds out slop 24/7 and you -emdash- again -emdash- don't have to pay actual people to create anything new.
        noosphr 6mo ago
        >If we knew we were feeding a yet-to-be-invented slop machine that would allow megacorps to unemploy all the creatives, most of us would not have supported that. We have multiple Communist ais that is on par with Western ai from 18 months ago and can run locally on 5 year old hardware. I have no idea the fever nightmare you live in but the future is bright and only getting better.
    - hx8 6mo ago
      I think you just want to make a comparison of copyright to slavery. Property classes are born and die everyday. You can own the rights to publish an arcade video game, but that class of rights would have been way more valuable 45 years ago. NFTs were born and died just recently. You can own digital assets worth real money in an online game that simply shuts down. Some people may read this and say "these don't qualify as a property class", to which I will remind you that property class used in this way is a brand new term, which I think is invented solely to be able to compare the limitations on human freedom associated with slavery to the limitations on human freedom associated with intellectual property.
    - achierius 6mo ago
      > The last time a property class was removed was _slaves_. Easy counterexample: titles of nobility. Also perpetual bonds, delegated taxation rights, the ability to mint currency. The list goes on. If you're going to use history to support your AI bull agenda, you should at least pre-fly it with the AI first -- it would have pointed this out. > Arguing that copyright is good because a subset of big tech doesn't want it around is as stupid as arguing that slavery is good because the robber barons don't like it. Sorry, who's saying it's good? You are, actually, insofar as you're willing to support the right of AI companies to take people's information and use it to create copyrighted model weights. Why do you care less about the intellectual property of billionaires than that of the common man? Do you really think they're on your side?
  - johnnyanmac 6mo ago
    We don't technically have "winner take all" capitalism. At least some people 90 ish years ago we had many mechanisms to regulate such situations. Then more vampires creeped in and convinced people that the government they were voted into sucks. So began a campaign to ruin the regulations protecting them from the vampires as they slowly filled their blood banks.
underlipton 6mo ago
It becomes a bit easier to see when you finish the sentence. "Information wants to be free (from ______)." If you filled that blank in with "rent-seeking Capitalists and corporations," you likely have everything you need to understand why they don't see it as a turn. I say this as someone whose notions exist orthogonal to the debate; I use AI freely but also don't have any qualms about encouraging people to upend the current paradigm and pop the bubble.
- lxgr 6mo ago
  Sure, with enough effort, you can find a seemingly clever way to turn almost every mantra into its semantic opposite.
  - underlipton 6mo ago
    It doesn't take much cleverness because we're talking about a straightforward dynamic. A counter-cultural expression that was a "screw you" aimed at corporations was co-opted and misinterpreted by those same corporations as "It's free real estate", and now the latter are flummoxed that they're not buddies with the former. Well, points up that's why.
GaryBluto 6mo ago
"Information wants to be free, but only be used by people I wholly endorse." is the motto. You'll see young people singing the praises of piracy but then use "piracy" as an excuse for hating LLMs.
- ginko 6mo ago
  Corporations are not people.
  - GaryBluto 6mo ago
    Who works at corporations and benefits from their actions?
    - csande17 6mo ago
      If my LinkedIn feed is any indication, bizarre inhuman ghouls who wear the names and profile pictures of my college friends like skin-suits and exclusively post AI-generated marketing materials for AI products.
    - johnnyanmac 6mo ago
      About a few million less Americans than a few years ago, I guess.
jordanb 6mo ago
Those people where trying to build a sharing/gift economy. They weren't able to keep bad actors out of their sharing economy. They are bitter that their utopian dreams got hijacked by self-dealers. Why is that wild?
- aksss 6mo ago
  > utopian dreams got hijacked by self-dealers Such is the fate of all utopian dreams.
- lxgr 6mo ago
  It's highly debatable whether, in case of an information sharing/gift economy, the concept of "bad actors coming in and ruining it for everybody by taking without giving back" even makes sense. The information is still there, as is the community that you've built, the joy that you get out of sharing the information, everything you've learned... Why is any of that diminished, just because some people or entities that you dislike also got something out of it?
  - SlinkyOnStairs 6mo ago
    It's diminished because the hard reality is that you need money to live. The end result of major tech companies sweeping in, taking everyone's creative work, outcompeting the originals with AI derivatives, and telling every artist on the planet "fuck off, send a job application to McDonalds" is significantly less art. Copyright was invented to prevent exactly this scenario.
    - lxgr 6mo ago
      Yes, which is why hackers and artists (at least those mainly publishing instead of mainly performing for a live audience) are ultimately not natural/inherent allies. Hackers have usually drawn their funding from their (often lucrative) employment, which is what gave them the freedom to give away the products of their hacking for free. One needs copyright to survive, the other see it as a means to enforce openness at best (those in favor of copyleft) and as an obstacle to their pursuit (owning the full system, liberating all aspects of and information about it) at worst. This rift was always visible if you knew where to look, but AI is definitely wedging it wide open.
lxgr 6mo ago
Hackers are not one big homogeneous group (although there definitely are larger trends, and maybe you have a point there). Still, people were saying all kinds of inane stuff 25 years ago too.
belorn 6mo ago
This claim of contradiction has never worked for me. Let say person A wants everyone to be rich. Person B plots a plan to make themself rich and everyone else poorer. One can make an argument that any action by A is now a contradiction. If they work with B, it makes a lot of people poorer and not richer. If they work against B, B do not get rich. However this is not a contradiction. If a company use training data in ways that reduce and harm other peoples ability to access information, like hiding attribution or misrepresenting the data and sources, people who advocate for free information can have a consistent view and also work against such use. It is not a shift. It is only a shift if we believe that copyright will be removed, works will be given to the public for free, and companies will no longer try to hide and protect creative works and information.
- haberman 6mo ago
  You can certainly argue second-order effects (ie. we have to restrict information to save information), but the movie studios were making that same argument at the time: > If copyright can no longer protect the distribution of the work they produce, who will invest immense sums to create films or any other creative material of the kind we now take for granted? Do the thieves really expect new music and movies to continue pouring forth if the artists and companies behind them are not paid for their work? --Jack Valenti, Motion Picture Association of America, 2000 (https://archive.is/PBy7C https://archive.is/PBy7C) It sounds remarkably similar to what people concerned about AI say today. How do we make sure that artists get paid? I don't think many hackers found the argument compelling at the time.
  - jordanb 6mo ago
    You're taking Jack Valenti at face value. He said "we're here to protect the artists" because the artists were popular and the record labels were not. He was in the business of protecting the labels and screwing the artists and everyone knew it.
    - haberman 6mo ago
      The artists were certainly making more money from the studios and record labels than they got from the authors of DeCSS, Napster, BitTorrent, The Pirate Bay, etc. When Gillian Welch wrote "Everything is Free" in 2001, she wasn't complaining about the record companies, she was complaining about Napster. > Q: Do you remember where you were when you wrote “Everything is Free”? > A: I do. I remember exactly where I was and what was going on. It was when Napster was starting to decimate the traditional recording industry dynamic, the viability of making your livelihood [from] your art. --Gillian Welch, 2018 (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/gillian-welch-everything-is-free-courtney-barnett-father-john-misty-725135/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/gillian-we...)
Legend2440 6mo ago
Politics will make more sense once you realize no one is trying to have consistent principles. People are in general for whatever they think will benefit them, and against what they think will harm them. So piracy is ok when it benefits the little guy and not ok when it benefits the big guy. Unions are good when they stand up against employers, and bad when they discriminate against non-union workers. There's no contradiction there.
solaire_oa 6mo ago
If you're implying that it's a violation of the original hacker ethos, I disagree. "Information wants to be free" is a small part of the hacker ethos venn diagram. There are many hacker ethos traits that aren't about cracking, specifically. Also, the server "information" isn't free (as in beer) to begin with, it costs server availability. Coming up ways to penalize greedy actors is not only well within the server operator's perogative, it's an interesting tit-for-tat problem that could pique any hacker's interests. A bonus hacker trait is that these poisoning responses are individualistic, i.e. the government doesn't get involved, where certainly more aggressive anti-AI sentiments could (wrongly) call for that. So I'd say this type of LLM-resistance falls squarely in the original hacker ethos, even though it incidentally counteracts one minor aspect of "information availability". Though I'd certainly agree that the picture today is a lot different than it was. Ironic even.
TwoNineFive 6mo ago
THEN: "You can't violate our copyright because it's ours and belongs to us." NOW: "We can violate your copyright because we want to." YOU: "Where's mine, and how do I make more people click on these ads?"
subjectsigma 6mo ago
Those people were always lying, it was always about power dynamics. People hated DRM and surveillance because they saw it as punching down. People now hate AI wielded by corpos because they see it as punching down. Extremely few (if any) people ever bought into the “cyber-utopia” thing and now the mask has completely come off, everyone knows the Internet is a tool for subjugation
rpdillon 6mo ago
For what it's worth, I've generally sort of been on the "information, wants to be free" side of things, and I still am. I don't really understand the folks that released their software under open source license and are now upset that LLMs are training on it -- those folks were pretty quiet when their source code was being indexed by Google. But I suppose that's because Google was sending traffic their way with they could then monetize. So this is much less about any kind of philosophical argument and much more about who's getting money, which I don't really care about. I view one of the core values of open source software as being something that we can learn from, whether that's through AI or otherwise.
- DamnInteresting 6mo ago
  > I don't really understand the folks that released their software under open source license and are now upset that LLMs are training on it The key word there is "license." Open source often has strings attached--an obligation to credit the source, an obligation to release derivative code under the same license, etc. LLMs seldom respect the license, they just quietly and extensively plagiarize everything.
array_key_first 6mo ago
The common string between both of those advocacies is that they heavily favor huge corporations instead of the little guy. Basically, DMCA and DRM makes you a criminal while protecting NBC and Disney and such. And AI steals your work and allows soulless mega corps to basically take your job. Personally I'd argue AI is very likely to be worse for the average person, depending on their career. Some people don't care or maybe don't realize. And then I think some people are just naive, and are assuming everyone else will be fucked, but they won't be. And then some other people are self-destructive, and they know it will make their life harder - but they advocate for it anyway, because they feel they deserve the suffering, and maybe hold some misguided belief that suffering is the fuel of victory.
eudamoniac 6mo ago
It was never about some "information wants to be free" philosophy for most people. It was about, "I want information to be free for me to access, and btw fuck big corporations." No real shift happened.
karmickoala 5mo ago
There's a big asymmetry of power here and "information wants to be free" was about empowering the people. Currently, corporations are bad faith actors that corrupted the idea, making it free only for themselves. Can't you see the asymmetry here? For instance, they should release the weights of the models they trained on everyone else work, but we're not seeing that except for Meta and some other groups.

noosphr 6mo ago

This is what happens when a culture doesn't have robust exclusionary mechanisms for people who want to burn it down. We welcomed the vampires in and wonder why our necks hurt.

ryandrake 6mo ago
This is like saying Winner Take All Capitalism doesn't have an exclusionary mechanism for the rich. The system exists for the sole purpose of serving the already-rich. The vampires are an inevitability baked into the system from the start.
- noosphr 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - jordanb 6mo ago
    Disney is all-in on AI. They are thrilled. The folks fighting perpetual copyright were not fighting to make it possible for Disney to fire creatives. In fact they were fighting for the creatives to triumph over Disney.
    - noosphr 6mo ago
      Disney is all in because all their characters are entering the public domain over the next 5 years. They can't fight like it's 1998 because youtube is now worth more than they are. > In fact they were fighting for the creatives to triumph over Disney. We were doing nothing of the sort. It was "Information wants to be free" not "we want to provide a perpetual job for a subset white collar workers". sprinkles holy water
      - jordanb 6mo ago
        Well I was in that cohort and none of us were thinking we were helping megacorps create the content slop machine from 1984. Our concern was that corporations were expanding the definition of intellectual property to the extent where you couldn't make a movie or song or write a book as an individual without some corporation with a massive "IP" warchest coming after you and declaring it derivative. You couldn't write some software without a corporation with a massive repository of junk patents claiming you infringe. We wanted to insure that individual creators could continue to have a voice, and not get sued out of existence by an IP Legal/Industrial Complex that was forming causing arms races between megacorps and SLAPs against everyone else. If we knew we were feeding a yet-to-be-invented slop machine that would allow megacorps to unemploy all the creatives, most of us would not have supported that. And by the way Disney is all in on AI for the same reason they were all in on perpetual copyright. In the perpetual copyright world, having a massive library of content you no longer have to pay residuals on was a source of massive amounts of "free" revenue. You could just keep re-releasing and re-making stuff. You did not have to do the messy, expensive work of paying people to come up with really good new stuff. In the AI world, the money-printing capital asset is the trained model that grinds out slop 24/7 and you -emdash- again -emdash- don't have to pay actual people to create anything new.
        noosphr 6mo ago
        >If we knew we were feeding a yet-to-be-invented slop machine that would allow megacorps to unemploy all the creatives, most of us would not have supported that. We have multiple Communist ais that is on par with Western ai from 18 months ago and can run locally on 5 year old hardware. I have no idea the fever nightmare you live in but the future is bright and only getting better.
  - hx8 6mo ago
    I think you just want to make a comparison of copyright to slavery. Property classes are born and die everyday. You can own the rights to publish an arcade video game, but that class of rights would have been way more valuable 45 years ago. NFTs were born and died just recently. You can own digital assets worth real money in an online game that simply shuts down. Some people may read this and say "these don't qualify as a property class", to which I will remind you that property class used in this way is a brand new term, which I think is invented solely to be able to compare the limitations on human freedom associated with slavery to the limitations on human freedom associated with intellectual property.
  - achierius 6mo ago
    > The last time a property class was removed was _slaves_. Easy counterexample: titles of nobility. Also perpetual bonds, delegated taxation rights, the ability to mint currency. The list goes on. If you're going to use history to support your AI bull agenda, you should at least pre-fly it with the AI first -- it would have pointed this out. > Arguing that copyright is good because a subset of big tech doesn't want it around is as stupid as arguing that slavery is good because the robber barons don't like it. Sorry, who's saying it's good? You are, actually, insofar as you're willing to support the right of AI companies to take people's information and use it to create copyrighted model weights. Why do you care less about the intellectual property of billionaires than that of the common man? Do you really think they're on your side?
- johnnyanmac 6mo ago
  We don't technically have "winner take all" capitalism. At least some people 90 ish years ago we had many mechanisms to regulate such situations. Then more vampires creeped in and convinced people that the government they were voted into sucks. So began a campaign to ruin the regulations protecting them from the vampires as they slowly filled their blood banks.

underlipton 6mo ago

It becomes a bit easier to see when you finish the sentence. "Information wants to be free (from ______)." If you filled that blank in with "rent-seeking Capitalists and corporations," you likely have everything you need to understand why they don't see it as a turn. I say this as someone whose notions exist orthogonal to the debate; I use AI freely but also don't have any qualms about encouraging people to upend the current paradigm and pop the bubble.

lxgr 6mo ago
Sure, with enough effort, you can find a seemingly clever way to turn almost every mantra into its semantic opposite.
- underlipton 6mo ago
  It doesn't take much cleverness because we're talking about a straightforward dynamic. A counter-cultural expression that was a "screw you" aimed at corporations was co-opted and misinterpreted by those same corporations as "It's free real estate", and now the latter are flummoxed that they're not buddies with the former. Well, points up that's why.

GaryBluto 6mo ago

"Information wants to be free, but only be used by people I wholly endorse." is the motto. You'll see young people singing the praises of piracy but then use "piracy" as an excuse for hating LLMs.

ginko 6mo ago
Corporations are not people.
- GaryBluto 6mo ago
  Who works at corporations and benefits from their actions?
  - csande17 6mo ago
    If my LinkedIn feed is any indication, bizarre inhuman ghouls who wear the names and profile pictures of my college friends like skin-suits and exclusively post AI-generated marketing materials for AI products.
  - johnnyanmac 6mo ago
    About a few million less Americans than a few years ago, I guess.

jordanb 6mo ago

Those people where trying to build a sharing/gift economy. They weren't able to keep bad actors out of their sharing economy. They are bitter that their utopian dreams got hijacked by self-dealers. Why is that wild?

aksss 6mo ago
> utopian dreams got hijacked by self-dealers Such is the fate of all utopian dreams.
lxgr 6mo ago
It's highly debatable whether, in case of an information sharing/gift economy, the concept of "bad actors coming in and ruining it for everybody by taking without giving back" even makes sense. The information is still there, as is the community that you've built, the joy that you get out of sharing the information, everything you've learned... Why is any of that diminished, just because some people or entities that you dislike also got something out of it?
- SlinkyOnStairs 6mo ago
  It's diminished because the hard reality is that you need money to live. The end result of major tech companies sweeping in, taking everyone's creative work, outcompeting the originals with AI derivatives, and telling every artist on the planet "fuck off, send a job application to McDonalds" is significantly less art. Copyright was invented to prevent exactly this scenario.
  - lxgr 6mo ago
    Yes, which is why hackers and artists (at least those mainly publishing instead of mainly performing for a live audience) are ultimately not natural/inherent allies. Hackers have usually drawn their funding from their (often lucrative) employment, which is what gave them the freedom to give away the products of their hacking for free. One needs copyright to survive, the other see it as a means to enforce openness at best (those in favor of copyleft) and as an obstacle to their pursuit (owning the full system, liberating all aspects of and information about it) at worst. This rift was always visible if you knew where to look, but AI is definitely wedging it wide open.

lxgr 6mo ago

Hackers are not one big homogeneous group (although there definitely are larger trends, and maybe you have a point there). Still, people were saying all kinds of inane stuff 25 years ago too.

belorn 6mo ago

This claim of contradiction has never worked for me. Let say person A wants everyone to be rich. Person B plots a plan to make themself rich and everyone else poorer. One can make an argument that any action by A is now a contradiction. If they work with B, it makes a lot of people poorer and not richer. If they work against B, B do not get rich. However this is not a contradiction. If a company use training data in ways that reduce and harm other peoples ability to access information, like hiding attribution or misrepresenting the data and sources, people who advocate for free information can have a consistent view and also work against such use. It is not a shift. It is only a shift if we believe that copyright will be removed, works will be given to the public for free, and companies will no longer try to hide and protect creative works and information.

haberman 6mo ago
You can certainly argue second-order effects (ie. we have to restrict information to save information), but the movie studios were making that same argument at the time: > If copyright can no longer protect the distribution of the work they produce, who will invest immense sums to create films or any other creative material of the kind we now take for granted? Do the thieves really expect new music and movies to continue pouring forth if the artists and companies behind them are not paid for their work? --Jack Valenti, Motion Picture Association of America, 2000 (https://archive.is/PBy7C https://archive.is/PBy7C) It sounds remarkably similar to what people concerned about AI say today. How do we make sure that artists get paid? I don't think many hackers found the argument compelling at the time.
- jordanb 6mo ago
  You're taking Jack Valenti at face value. He said "we're here to protect the artists" because the artists were popular and the record labels were not. He was in the business of protecting the labels and screwing the artists and everyone knew it.
  - haberman 6mo ago
    The artists were certainly making more money from the studios and record labels than they got from the authors of DeCSS, Napster, BitTorrent, The Pirate Bay, etc. When Gillian Welch wrote "Everything is Free" in 2001, she wasn't complaining about the record companies, she was complaining about Napster. > Q: Do you remember where you were when you wrote “Everything is Free”? > A: I do. I remember exactly where I was and what was going on. It was when Napster was starting to decimate the traditional recording industry dynamic, the viability of making your livelihood [from] your art. --Gillian Welch, 2018 (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/gillian-welch-everything-is-free-courtney-barnett-father-john-misty-725135/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/gillian-we...)

Legend2440 6mo ago

Politics will make more sense once you realize no one is trying to have consistent principles. People are in general for whatever they think will benefit them, and against what they think will harm them. So piracy is ok when it benefits the little guy and not ok when it benefits the big guy. Unions are good when they stand up against employers, and bad when they discriminate against non-union workers. There's no contradiction there.

solaire_oa 6mo ago

If you're implying that it's a violation of the original hacker ethos, I disagree. "Information wants to be free" is a small part of the hacker ethos venn diagram. There are many hacker ethos traits that aren't about cracking, specifically. Also, the server "information" isn't free (as in beer) to begin with, it costs server availability. Coming up ways to penalize greedy actors is not only well within the server operator's perogative, it's an interesting tit-for-tat problem that could pique any hacker's interests. A bonus hacker trait is that these poisoning responses are individualistic, i.e. the government doesn't get involved, where certainly more aggressive anti-AI sentiments could (wrongly) call for that. So I'd say this type of LLM-resistance falls squarely in the original hacker ethos, even though it incidentally counteracts one minor aspect of "information availability". Though I'd certainly agree that the picture today is a lot different than it was. Ironic even.

TwoNineFive 6mo ago

THEN: "You can't violate our copyright because it's ours and belongs to us." NOW: "We can violate your copyright because we want to." YOU: "Where's mine, and how do I make more people click on these ads?"

subjectsigma 6mo ago

Those people were always lying, it was always about power dynamics. People hated DRM and surveillance because they saw it as punching down. People now hate AI wielded by corpos because they see it as punching down. Extremely few (if any) people ever bought into the “cyber-utopia” thing and now the mask has completely come off, everyone knows the Internet is a tool for subjugation

rpdillon 6mo ago

For what it's worth, I've generally sort of been on the "information, wants to be free" side of things, and I still am. I don't really understand the folks that released their software under open source license and are now upset that LLMs are training on it -- those folks were pretty quiet when their source code was being indexed by Google. But I suppose that's because Google was sending traffic their way with they could then monetize. So this is much less about any kind of philosophical argument and much more about who's getting money, which I don't really care about. I view one of the core values of open source software as being something that we can learn from, whether that's through AI or otherwise.

DamnInteresting 6mo ago
> I don't really understand the folks that released their software under open source license and are now upset that LLMs are training on it The key word there is "license." Open source often has strings attached--an obligation to credit the source, an obligation to release derivative code under the same license, etc. LLMs seldom respect the license, they just quietly and extensively plagiarize everything.

array_key_first 6mo ago

The common string between both of those advocacies is that they heavily favor huge corporations instead of the little guy. Basically, DMCA and DRM makes you a criminal while protecting NBC and Disney and such. And AI steals your work and allows soulless mega corps to basically take your job. Personally I'd argue AI is very likely to be worse for the average person, depending on their career. Some people don't care or maybe don't realize. And then I think some people are just naive, and are assuming everyone else will be fucked, but they won't be. And then some other people are self-destructive, and they know it will make their life harder - but they advocate for it anyway, because they feel they deserve the suffering, and maybe hold some misguided belief that suffering is the fuel of victory.

eudamoniac 6mo ago

It was never about some "information wants to be free" philosophy for most people. It was about, "I want information to be free for me to access, and btw fuck big corporations." No real shift happened.

karmickoala 5mo ago

There's a big asymmetry of power here and "information wants to be free" was about empowering the people. Currently, corporations are bad faith actors that corrupted the idea, making it free only for themselves. Can't you see the asymmetry here? For instance, they should release the weights of the models they trained on everyone else work, but we're not seeing that except for Meta and some other groups.