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It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got a

• cyber_kinetist 18d ago
  At least the Chinese AI companies are doing good service open-sourcing their models back to the public.
  • mitxela 18d ago
    There are no open-source LLMs. There are only downloadable LLMs, with no source for the model being provided. The source for the training and inference programs is not the source for the model itself, which would be the training set, training program, and random seeds.
    • okeuro49 18d ago
      OLMo
• pluc 18d ago
  Has it affected DD as deeply as it as affected software engineering? Guessing clients feel a lot more "empowered" or "independent" and knowledgeable these days? I liked doing DD, just as much as I enjoyed developing, but it must be dying a slow death too. What's changed in how DD reports are produced?
  • dgellow 18d ago
    What is DD supposed to mean? Nit: Please don’t use obscure acronyms when writing things to an international audience without defining them first… DD can mean so many different things
    • turzmo 18d ago
      Due diligence — pretty standard acronym in this community.
      • oblio 18d ago
        No it's not, and I've been here more than a decade.
      • dgellow 18d ago
        We aren’t on WSB. DD can mean datadog, domain driven, design driven, data driven, etc
    • pluc 18d ago
      My bad, I assumed everyone knew parent. Quick click on his profile will tell you what DD is. https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
• pingou 18d ago
  >It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up Would regulation help with that? Right now you can download free models that have been trained on that "stolen" data. With regulation and compensation, only rich companies would be able to do that, and they would definitely not give it back for free. I put "stolen" in quotation marks because it's still unclear if we can call that stealing. Nobody would say a human reading a book and learning from it is stealing. I'm not saying that a machine doing the same is equivalent, but the only thing I am sure of is that I am not sure we can call it "stealing".
  • embedding-shape 18d ago
    > With regulation and compensation, only rich companies would be able to do that Well, with some imagination, you can have regulation that forces companies to open up, not just close down. Imagine a law that stipulates that if you want to offer "LLM-inference-as-a-service", you need to also publish exact details about how it was trained, what datasets were used and also offer those exact weights for download. Sure, this would never happen, but just offering another perspective on how laws and regulation can be used if it was wanted, locking stuff down and pulling up the ladder behind you isn't the only way to use laws, although that is a very popular reason and approach.
    • ben_w 18d ago
      I am unclear how this would help anyone? Any argument that writers and artists lose from these existing, would remain unchanged.
      • embedding-shape 18d ago
        The argument was "It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up". Remove the "selling" part, and force them to give the weights away for free, and at least it's no longer robbery that few rich people benefit from. Kind of like how public and free torrent piracy is easier to morally and ethically defend than piracy where they sell access to pirated content. I think we're past the point were we can feasible pay for "IP-protected bytes" digitally, better to just move past the concept. It's been slowly disappearing for a long time now already, most of us make most of our money on live events and other AFK activities rather than actually selling our art, maybe time for the rest to get onboard with this too.
• CrimsonRain 18d ago
  Every time you're writing software or building machines/factories (which is automating things), you are committing a crime. Every time you learn from your superiors or colleagues, get better than them, get promotion or they get fired, you are committing a crime. Provide justice there first.
  • oblio 18d ago
    Scale matters. The average human doesn't do much on his own, and definitely doesn't uproot society or risk siphoning/leeching wealth from every person on this planet.
    • CrimsonRain 18d ago
      Yes, the whole IT sector is built on it. Robbing jobs, money, power, opportunities from billions of people and delegating them in to shitty jobs. Average human on his own...why draw the line there? It doesn't matter much what one human does...but what many/collective/society do and society has been "ripping off", "uprooting", "leeching (read: creating)" wealth since dawn of time. It is called PROGRESS.
      • oblio 18d ago
        > It is called PROGRESS. There is no such thing as PROGRESS for progress' sake. And FYI, agriculture is a wonderful invention. Yet for about 5000 years after its introduction the average human had worse nutrition than the average hunter gatherer, which led to such things as height decreases for those 5000 years. Industrial agriculture is another wonderful invention. Yet 150 years later we're not sure it's sustainable and it's likely many of its aspects aren't, which will raise some sticky issues soon ("which billion people do we decide to let starve since we can't make enough food for everyone after most of our soil eroded?"). Repeat this for industrial textile production, mining, etc. I won't even go into climate change. And again, scale matters. Most individuals can only control what they do, and what they do generally doesn't impact much. But companies can impact a whole lot. > "ripping off", "uprooting", "leeching (read: creating)" wealth Let's not be 100% cynical here. A lot of what humanity has achieved has been genuine wealth creation and distribution/re-distribution. I would say more wealth has been created than leeched off. * * * And before you think I'm some starry eyed teen, I'll play the game. At the end of the day, me and mine have to outrun you in the face of PROGRESS. May the odds be ever in your favor.
• Razengan 18d ago
  > sell it back to us at a mark-up. What if it was for free, like Wikipedia? > Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. jfc no, sit down. Try doing something about the actual evil shit like arms manufacturers and the politicians ordering the deaths and misery of millions from the comfort of their couch. At this point in our civilization, all human knowledge NEEDS to be collated in one place and easily queryable. Otherwise it's just too damn difficult to make any further progress at the edge of our understanding; there's just too much shit for one person to learn "manually" (wait I'm not advocating for low-effort slop, chill) It's helping common folk who wanted to do something but didn't know where to start, while legacy search engines increasingly lead to spam, shallow knowledge or outright predatory shit (ofc AI could go this way too) Example: Not long ago I had the misfortune of becoming interested in some WarHammer 40K lore. Most of the links led to Fandom (the enshittification of Wikia) and that place is a cesspool of obnoxious ads. That content was written by unpaid volunteers. Should Fandom keep profiting from their work for perpetuity? Should I not be able to get the gist of what the heck a Qoiazrjirnowerx@# is without wasting my mortal lifespan on a horrible website? Or, if I need to ask something peculiar, should I post on Reddit or StackOverflow or HN and wait for someone to see it and deem to give a sufficient answer, only to have a pricky mod decide that the question doesn't "fit" the community? God hell no, if you don't know how much bullshit AI could eliminate for the silent majority then you were probably part of that bullshit. (that's a general "you" for whomever was fine with the status quo and not a personal insult @ anybody) If you see something you dislike increasing in popularity but can't figure out why, it's probably because a lot of people were sick of the way things used to work but their complaints were ignored by the people who now find themselves disrupted.
  • steveBK123 18d ago
    Defending the same entities getting large DoD contracts to use AI for killing?
    • Razengan 18d ago
      They've been using computers for killing for decades, who's taking up pitchforks against computers? Who's taking up pitchforks against THEM? How do we keep getting deflected into hating the TECH instead of the people who abuse it??
• TacticalCoder 18d ago
  [flagged]
  • api 18d ago
    IMO if they didn’t have proper licensing to train on the data the model should not be copyrightable. In the long term though I think models have no moat, so the cost will fall to the cost of compute and storage. Which is why they’re pushing AI safety panics: regulatory capture to outlaw open models and outlaw competition. And yeah, EA is neither effective nor altruistic. It’s a cult, part of the “Rationalist” and adjacent cluster of tech cults. They’re to tech what Scientology is to Hollywood I guess.
• sneak 18d ago
  Copying data isn't a crime.
  • nullbio 18d ago
    Agreed, but now they're trying to stop other people from copying data so that they can be the sole gatekeepers of humanities collective knowledge.
    • CrimsonRain 18d ago
      And they should get effed. Distilling should be a right.
    • lostmsu 18d ago
      Good luck with that.
  • djierardi 18d ago
    "copyright". its right there in the name of the rights.
• noosphr 18d ago
  >It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. Yeah the introduction of copyright was truly criminal. > So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling. Oh wait ...
• erulastiel 18d ago
  “It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime” lol at this edgy 5th grade statement. So ridiculous.
• dataviz1000 18d ago
  Owning ideas with copyright and patents is what separates the United States from communism. The first time a saw a documentary about Tetris it really hit me what communism is -- nobody owned anything they invented or created. [0] It was a long time ago and I remember feeling sad watching the story. In the Soviet Union, a group of ~15 people, Politburo, controlled everything including any thought written to paper. It is this one line, Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8, that separates the United States from the disaster that was the Soviet Union: > To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; I don't think it is far fetched to call ignoring and disregarding the Copyright Clause a communist revolution, violent or not. That is the one thing the communists -- there have been many over the years inside the United States -- would change to make the United States a communist country. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#Spread_beyond_the_Soviet_Union_(1985%E2%80%931988) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#Spread_beyond_the_Sovie...
  • vitorfblima 18d ago
    In a communist society there is no profit (or incentive for), thus no need for copyright laws. It's not abolishing copyrights that would turn the US into a commie country, communism is about abolishing private ownership to the means of production.
    • deleted 18d ago
      [deleted]
    • card_zero 18d ago
      Well it's worth reading the linked wiki article section, which includes a link to another article "Copyright law of the Soviet Union", flatly contradicting you unless you maintain that the USSR wasn't truly communist.
      • echoangle 18d ago
        > unless you maintain that the USSR wasn't truly communist. Didn’t they themselves say they were a socialist society on the path to communism? Does anyone think the USSR was communist?
• logicchains 18d ago
  >It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling. This is such a brain-dead take. By that logic there could never be any kind of AI, because unlike a human it'd be completely forbidden from learning from the sources of knowledge from which humans learn. It's stupid to suggest silicon brains should not legally be able to read copyrighted material just because you hate bigcos and capitalism. Learning isn't stealing, regardless of whether it's done by a human or a machine. By your logic someone reading and memorizing all somebody's life work is appropriation; completely inane.
  • kg 18d ago
    You're ignoring that there are options other than theft. Heard of buying things?
    • px43 18d ago
      Do you think OpenAI has a New York Times subscription? Do you think that's actually relevant to what the New York Times is arguing here? The vast a majority of text that is being claimed to have been "stolen" was never for sale. Reddit posts, deviant art images, personal websites, etc.
  • chrisjj 18d ago
    > This is such a brain-dead take. By that logic there could never be any kind of AI, because unlike a human it'd be completely forbidden from learning from the sources of knowledge from which humans learn. Incorrect. You overlooked consideration.
  • layer8 18d ago
    Learning isn’t stealing, but if you’d set up a forum or hotline where paid staff would answer questions and write essay directly based on NYT content without a license for that content, that would probably be deemed illegal.
    • 18d ago
• user43928 18d ago
  It is the largest democratization of knowledge that ever happened. The 'sell it back to us' argument falls short in my view. Free versions are abundant, and in some time useful models will ship preinstalled on all mobile phones. The comment here seems incredibly pessimistic and quite dramatical.
  • oblio 18d ago
    > Free versions are abundant, Awesome, can I make my own competitive LLM, just like I can make my own open source software? > and in some time useful models will ship preinstalled on all mobile phones. Considering hardware prices, that "some time" is doing super heavy lifting. It could be 10-15+ years before that happens and the local LLM is actually useful. Most people don't see hardware prices declining from current prices until at least 2030, likely much longer.
    • user43928 18d ago
      No. I also cannot make a competitive computer, yet can use one for my work to remain competitive. Yes, it could take some time to arrive on phones. It is questionable if it will ever make sense compared to using a paid hosted provider. But what are 10 years in the grand scheme of things? Should we have scrapped it all, called it a crime against humanity, and never developed AI, because it will take a decade to disseminate the benefits to everyone?
      • oblio 18d ago
        > Should we have scrapped it all, called it a crime against humanity, and never developed AI, because it will take a decade to disseminate the benefits to everyone? Nah, we should have: 1. invested less, in a more targeted way 2. ideally like ARPANET, with the benefits given to all humanity 3. with fair royalties paid to all (where relevant) 4. and by creating an ever growing shared curated and high quality data set that would allow anyone to create their own competitive LLM ARPANET & co were all taxpayer funded and the internet has created more wealth than most human inventions. The base should be part of the commons, everyone should knock themselves out by building on top. Exactly like the internet.
• cluckindan 18d ago
  Works produced by AI are not copyrightable. Are they in the public domain? Can an entity sell unique works which are in the public domain?
  • card_zero 18d ago
    Yes? I own a lot of books that were public domain when published (as reprints). I could read them on Gutenberg, but I'm paying for the nice paper formatting.
• godwinson__4-8 18d ago
  Our "culture" has long been the province of corporations. In prior epochs it was still the product of patronage and power. At least with LLMs we can glimpse an escape route to that which generations of humans have strived for - a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero. Instead of fixating on a remedy that seeks to criminalize AI, maybe focus on the relatively rather achievable goal of redistributing LLM gains. Would that not be the most desirable justice? What is your alternative, and would you foreclose the future in the name of a past that never really existed in the first place?
  • jaybeavers 18d ago
    Flourishing life? Where is your data leading to the conclusion that AI models are leading to the world populace leading a ‘flourishing life’? Are taxes on revenue of companies like OpenAI somehow being collected and turned into a UBI and I just didn’t hear about it?
    • godwinson__4-8 18d ago
      I said a glimpse. I didn't say it's here now or it would be easy. It is however, achievable. Certainly more so than engaging in the fantasy that we can criminalize LLMs out of existence. And it is likely more desirable than such an effort anyway.
      • bayindirh 18d ago
        Like trickle down economics? We all experience the substance which is trickling down.
      • jaybeavers 18d ago
        Or, perhaps, the companies forming the for profit LLMs could be made to pay a license fee for the copyrighted data they lifted from behind the paywall and then used to form a for profit entity with. Nothing about banning technology. How about enforcing DMCA and then applying a penalty for the knowing theft rather than negotiating a license?
• philipallstar 18d ago
  If piracy isn't stealing training definitely isn't stealing.
• inquirerGeneral 18d ago
  [dead]
• c1sc0 18d ago
  At the very least we should foribly confiscate the models & make them available free-for-all as open-weights downloads. Failing that, bring back the guillotine.
• kurtis_reed 18d ago
  Robbery implies taking it away from you so you can't have it anymore. How is that the case?
  • sicher 18d ago
    Intellectual property works differently.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 18d ago
  *Rent it back to us
• themgt 18d ago
  So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling. Let's say hypothetically a solution was legislated globally, wherein each living individual whose work was scraped for LLM training is compensated with royalties relative to the work's value. Would that resolve the injury caused by the intellectual osmosis? Of course many of the original thinkers are now dead, and this system would mostly benefit those writing before the LLM age rather than help people going forward. The more fundamental objection seems to just to the concept of a machine that "learns" by ingesting public information, which is maybe ultimately a feeling that reality itself constitutes a crime against humanity.
  • patrickmay 18d ago
    > Would that resolve the injury caused by the intellectual osmosis? Monetary compensation doesn't address the lack of consent. This type of usage was not anticipated when people made their intellectual product available for other humans to use. Scale does matter. What would resolve the injury would be to ask people if they are willing to have their content used in this way and to not train on material without consent. This includes open source software with particular licenses requiring attribution. Obviously there is too much money involved for this approach to work, but it strikes me as the most moral.
• brookst 18d ago
  Musicians and writers build new works on top off millennia of literary and musical history, then copyright their works and sell it back to us. Is this so bad? If Taylor Swift, consciously or subconsciously, gets an harmonic idea from a 1970's song and a fragment of a melody from some 1990's song... is that theft? I'm ambivalent about AI and, like all gold rushes, many of the players are terrible, dishonest, egomaniacal jerks. But I am deeply skeptical of the idea that aggregation of knowledge and culture is itself wrong. That's literally how culture has worked since the dawn of time, and our modern era obsession with credit and perpetual copyright is unhealthy. \ It's only in the past 100 years or so that this idea of "if you create it, it's yours alone and nobody can build on it without paying you" became current, and it was largely driven by the megacorps that AI haters used to hate (remember the despite for RIAA? I do). It's bizarre to think that someone's life work is entirely their property, as if they grew up in a box and did not build on hundreds of generations of other peoples' lives work. I don't object to disliking these companies; I object to the idea that you, me, anyone remixing culture is committing a crime. What the hell happened to the hacker ethos?
  • bayindirh 18d ago
    The problem is not Taylor Swift is being "inspired" from other artists. We have tons of examples this throughout history. The problem is, replacing Taylor Swift with its AI counterpart, and to use Taylor's own material to do that without getting her permission or compensating her. This is not about Taylor even. It's about everyone, you and me, and Taylor and Haggard and Blind Guardian and Sia, etc... We hated RIAA because they prevented us from listening to the music while trying to get it was hard and expensive. In short, we were not angry because they wanted compensation, but because they have cut the supply without giving us a solution. Now we have iTunes Store and Bandcamp for DRM free music, and nobody is against musicians getting their fair share. As a side note, I used to make music, I know what it entails. Hacker ethos has ethics. It has do experiment but don't cause harm embedded all over it. It's about experiment and discovery. Not about ripping people off for their own profit (unless you're a black hat of course), and getting things were free was part of sending a message, not monetary gain.
    • 18d ago
• JimDabell 18d ago
  > It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up Learning isn’t stealing. They didn’t take our culture away from us and nobody is “buying our culture back” from them. We never lost it; it never went anywhere.
  • 2ahsg1 18d ago
    Yes, you are getting a laundered version for a monthly payment to the rent seekers, who are 1000x worse than the RIAA. And the internet is destroyed by slop spam in the process, so our culture is diluted and crowded out.
  • bkaae 18d ago
    That's true. However it does sometimes feel like our culture is being buried in slop.
  • franktankbank 18d ago
    Imagine someone asks you how to do something at work, you tell them. Then they create a huge packet filled with bullshit about how it got done and now they are your boss.
    • TeMPOraL 18d ago
      It's a shitty move, but ultimately, in between the bullshit narrative, they also did the thing - not you - so the promotion rightfully belongs to them. Execution trumps ideas, impact trumps raw effort, and such. Isn't this the entrepreneurial narrative?
      • franktankbank 18d ago
        Sure thats obviously how it works today. Now what do I do next time someone comes and asks how to do something?
        • TeMPOraL 18d ago
          Of course you tell them, because you're nice person, and not jealous of someone else succeeding in a thing you aren't even pursuing? You wouldn't want to act like "the dog in the manger" from childhood stories.
• HumblyTossed 18d ago
  > It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Considering the audience here (aspiring tech billionaires), it'll be interesting the responses to this.
• TeMPOraL 18d ago
  > It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. This rhetoric sounds impressive, but really looks more like "piracy is theft" line from early 2000s, similarly flawed in basic premise. Whether the end result threatens the form in which culture is created, at least beyond just threatening the business models of the gatekeepers, is a separate discussion, but you can't draw the heart-string-pulling "life's work got appropriated" arguments there so easily. And let's not forget what we got back for this: reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West, inference is so dirt cheap that whole world uses it. It exploded in popularity organically, because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses. There's plenty to hate about how AI is transforming the world, but one thing it's not, is "robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up".
  • wjnc 18d ago
    Creators are unwillingly and contra to economic systems that have evolved over a few millennia entered in the Borg or the Matrix. So their achievements are reused for private and public benefits without their permission. Piracy is theft. And this piracy is a bigger theft than piracy on an individual download basis. Was there any doubt? (Linguistically I agree that you can’t “rob culture”. You can rape or reap culture though, and that is the point at hand.)
    • mrngld 18d ago
      HN crowd: Check out my Plex server and 132TB media collection! Also HN crowd: Reading publicly posted information on the open internet is morally outrageous theft of the highest order
      • TeMPOraL 18d ago
        Also, The crowd: "Knowledge should be free! Culture belongs to all of us! Information must be democratized!" AI companies *proceed to copy literally everything and put it through virtual blender, until an universal general-purpose problem-solver tool comes out, then give it out for free or serve for peanuts to literally everyone on the planet with Internet connection * Crowd: bbb..buuut not like that!
• intrasight 18d ago
  > sell it back to us at a mark-up sell it back to us as markdown
• boringg 18d ago
  “It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime“. That quote is from a fiction author - you’re essentially quoting Spiderman “with great power comes great responsibility”.
  • cryptonym 18d ago
    Are you seriously putting Balzac and Spiderman on the same level to try to ridicule thoughts? Ad hominem.
    • boringg 18d ago
      They are both quotes that people say things like "they say" to imply someone of import said it to give it credence and truth to it but were in fact from fictional sources. Exact same pattern - take it as an ad hominem all you want.
• Vaslo 18d ago
  Other than the rare books than have been ruined, all the same knowledge is still out there though. So it’s not robbed in the sense of a bank heist. Maybe in the sense of pirating a movie. The markup is the millions in training they committed and the connecting the knowledge. Seems like a reasonable trade off to me. You can choose not to use it though.
  • teh_klev 18d ago
    > all the same knowledge is still out there though > The markup is the millions in training they committed and the connecting the knowledge Sure, but gated behind a hallucinating idiot.
• ycsucks2 18d ago
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• farseer 18d ago
  Nobody has made much money from AI yet unless you count the shovel sellers (Nvidia). Not sure closed models would make any money ever and eventually the benefits should flow to everyone.
• bsoqk 18d ago
  If LLMs scraping the web is robbery then piracy is stealing.
• ls-a 18d ago
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• dhx 18d ago
  "Sweat of the brow" doctrine has been rejected in most countries.[1] Even Europe's Database Directive, probably the closest thing to an implementation of this doctrine, largely doesn't do much in practice. An example of "sweat of the brow" doctrine would be the series of "Beaches of ..." books by Andrew D. Short of the University of Sydney where significant sweat has been expended to visit and document every beach of Australia, particularly from a swimming safety perspective. That's a lot of very remote beaches, and many with crocodiles. Across the Northern extent of mainland Australia from Broome to Cooktown (this being one of the books in the series), 3500 beaches were visited and documented along 12000km of coastline.[2] AI could train on these books and gain an understanding of whether some small and unknown beach that receives <100 visitors a year has fine sand composition, pebbles, etc. Without "sweat of the brow", this use of AI is completely fine to regurgitate the facts learned from the book (regardless of the accuracy of the book). If "sweat of the brow" did exist, there would be some very significant (probably insurmountable) challenges to overcome, including: 1. You're a different expert in beaches and also want to visit all 3500 beaches across Northern Australia to provide a more up-to-date database, just in case beaches have changed in the last 10 years (e.g. sand washed away). In your database/book series, can you write "Andrew D. Short observed ACME Beach in 2006 to have fine sand. We observe 10 years later in 2026 the beach is now entirely pebbles of 15-20mm diameter", or is this infringing? 2. You're a researcher studying drowning deaths at Australian beaches and wish to extend the data published by Andrew D. Short's series of books with additional fields--dates of drownings at a beach, weather conditions on the day of drownings, etc, and then make some novel observations from the expanded dataset. Is this infringing? 3. You visit ACME Beach and observe and document it--what type of surface, dimensions, presence of reefs/rips/etc. You then put this information on your blog or social media account and it becomes a social media phenomenon as people are attracted to what has been revealed to be the best "secret" beach in the world. A few days later your website or social media account is blocked/deleted without warning--apparently there has been a complaint that you might have copied some facts out of a book you've never heard of. "Sweat of the brow" doctrine would almost certainly result in a tragedy of the anticommons[3] situation which would be worse for humanity as a whole. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow [2] https://sydneyuniversitypress.com/products/9781920898168 https://sydneyuniversitypress.com/products/9781920898168 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
• Betelbuddy 18d ago
  We know what is going inside black holes in other galaxies, we know the details of Israel nuclear program..., the Windows source code got leaked, we got the NSA tools and full details and locations of the Echelon architecture... Phds in Maths warns us daily about the terrible secrets of the evil AI inside their labs. How, their numeric matrices and gradient descent Python scripts, are about to kill 10% of us all, I guess the sick or genetically less interesting ones...and use the rest, as some meat/metal hive drones part of some Borg collective... There are ONLY TWO Stories and their details, that we collectively will never see. 1) One could come from the these brave souls that warns about an impending death...but their courage falters on another subject.... From Jacob Coxon to Evan Hubinger or Julie Steele, Samuel Marks, Josh Angels, Mrinank Sharma, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell....The story of the full datasets they used to train the models, the data they stole, how many PB was, the amounts of data, the nights setting up torrents from unsuspicions IPs, where is it currently stored and how many exabytes is now... the massive data cleansing and data quality program to conform all the different formats, the internal discussions on the ethics of the stolen files, how large was the team, the CSAM content they sucked with their automated scripts and who was handling it internally, the porn, the massive amount of porn that is after all 80% of the internet, the leaks their data sucked with their automated scripts... And the other... 2) The Epstein Files.
• ThrowawayTestr 18d ago
  I haven't paid a dime for any of the LLMs I've used (electricity and internet aside)
• deleted 18d ago
  [deleted]
• Cthulhu_ 18d ago
  So why is there so much outrage now when Google and other search engines did it 30 years ago? They literally said their objective was to collect and index all the world's knowledge, and when they scraped the internet clean a thousand times over they invested in scanning and digitizing everything that wasn't on the internet yet. AI is better at repackaging it back to the end user but ultimately I'm arguing it's the same thing. (caveat: yes I know there were plenty of people that objected to Google et al indexing everything; famously, Gmail was scary to a lot of people because they read your email to give you ads)
  • seanw444 18d ago
    It's not the same at all though. Google indexes the original content, hosted at the original location. It just gives you a way to find it. LLMs ingest the original data, throw it away, and spit it back out in whatever form they like back to the user. And since it's gotten so popular, many peoples' interactions with the content are no longer in the original form at all; their site traffic / book sales diminished.
  • sillyfluke 18d ago
    Google didn't immediately create $20 and $200 per month paid tiers. The free thing lasted a long time (and you didn't need to sign in), and the initial monetization with ads, when it eventually came, was not immediately shoved in the user's face. the enshittification and bean counting came way later compared to the monetization blitz that occured with the AI companies.
  • afavour 18d ago
    Because they aggregated links to that information rather than copy it outright. It’s like the difference between an encyclopedia and its table of contents.
  • giaour 18d ago
    Google (and other search engines) gave you an easy and reliable way to opt-out of having your content indexed and linked to. People did in fact object pretty loudly every time Google attempted to surface the information on google.com rather than sending traffic to the source.
• cineticdaffodil 18d ago
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• Aurornis 18d ago
  > It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. At a mark-up would mean it’s more expensive. The outrage is that they’re taking knowledge that was expensive to access because you had to hire experts or otherwise pay a lot of money for it and making it accessible to anyone who signs up for the ChatGPT free tier. Calling it “robbery” is also specious as no knowledge was taken away from anyone. The content in the training sets was out there in the world one way or another. It still is! I’m really perplexed by this sudden swing toward the idea that knowledge is something that we should encourage or incentivize to keep locked away or that other people should be forced to pay for use of knowledge. Roll back the clock a few years and tech sites would be almost unanimous about knowledge being free and unrestricted for the benefit of humanity. I’m keeping knowledge separate from actual direct rote duplication of content. Now we have this amazing era where I can download models to my computer, run them locally, and have enormous amounts of derived knowledge at my fingertips for the cost of some compute cycles. Except now it’s a “crime against humanity”?
  • d3rockk 18d ago
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• streetfighter64 18d ago
  I don't know about "crimes against humanity", seems to diminish a bunch of actual crimes against humanity. And Microsoft is one to complain! Talk about a glass house. Just checking the annual report for 2025, the median employee compensation was 200k per year, but the total dividends divided by number of employees was 100k, meaning that each employee gets only about 66% of the value they've generated. Isn't that theft? In any case, Microsoft has stolen 25 billion from its employees in 2025, and OpenAI has got 13 billion in revenue from "stolen" content in the same period, so that'd make them about equally bad villains, except OpenAI has mostly stolen from other companies.
• gkoz 18d ago
  Since they didn't improve the culture, it makes no sense to buy anything back at a mark-up. We can keep using the one we still have.
• antics9 18d ago
  It’s a crime against humanity if the only way to retrieve the digital version of the works is through an LLM. The web getting flooded with slop and drowning all original work is one way to go about that. Another is paywalling and gatekeeping en masse. A third is shutting down shadow libraries.
• underlipton 18d ago
  People are getting lost in the weeds and ignoring the simple, fundamental fact that these companies are making fortunes off of labor that they didn't attempt to compensate the laborers for. "Property" and "IP" discussions are distractions; no amount of it can rationally get us around the utter unfairness of what occurred and the way it will warp our economy at a basic level if not addressed. It's not even enough to make the weights and models free; access should be free, and everyone who hitched their horse to this wagon should be on the hook for keeping the systems running, on their dollar. They took ownership of a venture that is short one (1) "Humanity's entire cultural corpus", and the only question is if we're going to issue a margin call.
• larodi 18d ago
  > you can forget about anything coming of this. first of all - a lot of people are definitely not forgetting it. perhaps many more are waking up to the fact. when so many people wake up to the fact that a massive theft of intellectual property IS what enabled present day AI, they will inevitably refuse to a) publish that much openly; b) respect any kind of copyright claims imposed by those who perpetuated, facilitated, enabled the theft. so, really, a lot will be coming out of it, we like it or not.