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> 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 stole

> 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 24d 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 24d 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 24d 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!
    - GlacierFox 24d ago
      There's some nuance there you're purposefully/ignorantly supressing to create a more impactful fundamentalist observation, completely contrary to the comment you described above as : "heart-string-pulling "life's work got appropriated" argument" I think the water is very muddy in regards to this topic and comments like yours really highlight the distain some people have for others that have talking points about with things they create being thrown into a gargantuan 'blender' as you called it.
    - AgentOrange1234 24d ago
      "Give it out for free or serve for peanuts" is doing a lot of work here. The crowd should be skeptical that this will continue given how many times we have seen enshittification unfold before. Before LLMs, "knowledge should be free" was a call to preserve an open playing field where everyone has the ability to access the intellectual labor of humanity so they can contribute, instead of letting a few institutions wall it off for a profit. As knowledge is walled off behind these models, rent seeking will expand, "safety guardrails" will become more onerous, and the masses will lose their access. There are wonderful parallels between this and enclosure in Britain.
      - WarmWash 24d ago
        >instead of letting a few institutions wall it off for a profit. I cannot repeat enough that that is not true, or even remotely close to true. When ChatGPT helps me fix my toilet, saving me a $300 plumber call, I don't cut OAI a check for $300 instead. It is unbelievably easy to harvest more than $20 of value from all the basic plans. Right now, users are overwhelmingly capturing all the value. Even if they triple the price, it's trivial for most workers to easily justify it. We can project any future scenario we want, but right now the labs are only capturing a tiny fraction of the value they are creating. Especially for the crowd here on HN.
  - qahr16 24d ago
    Amodei: Check out my 1000 Exabytes torrent collection, which I weaseled out of with a $1.5 billion bribe. The usual human reading information on the internet does nothing with it. They don't adapt the style, they don't translate, they don't reblog a modified version. The ones that do have been criticized for stealing blog posts already before AI.
  - NateEag 24d ago
    Yes, in a huge crowd of people, you will get differing opinions. Do you have any other obvious facts you'd like to pretend are somehow relevant?
    - WarmWash 24d ago
      Because of the nature of upvoting on social media, we can pretty accurately dial in on what the crowds consensus is. Your response makes sense when we are pulling random marbles from a bag, like old school forums, but social media abandoned that style of commentary long ago.
      - NateEag 23d ago
        I don't think that holds at all. There are so many variables that go into upvoting and downvoting, and we can't even see the actual scores on HN posts. The data you refer to isn't available, AFAIK, and even if it were we'd have to account for the hundreds of confounding variables that contribute to post scores being what they are.
  - tmcb 24d ago
    People with a 132TB media collection don’t usually act as if they wrote and directed The Godfather. AI steals by lacking the ability to properly do either attribution and citation, whether this is accidental or by design. Downloading an existing PhD thesis without permission is very much different from submitting an existing PhD thesis as yours.
  - duskdozer 24d ago
    I'd bet if you asked a bunch of people off the street, you'd have a number of different takes on the ethics of stealing a loaf of bread, depending who stole it, from whom, and why.
  - sham1 24d ago
    An individual pirate is morally a lot less objectionable than the capitalist class pirating from literally everyone else. Yeah sure, it's on the open Internet, but then again, the capitalists could also actually adhere to the licensing terms of the free software they're hoovering up and all that. These are the same people who want to enforce all kinds of EULAs against the commons, employing measures such as DRM to protect their "intellectual property", so why is it suddenly okay to not comply with IP when it's them doing the infringement? And that's just with software, but this also affects other creative endeavours. Also the individual HN user's 132 TB Plex server doesn't suck up ludicrous amounts of resources from the commons.
  - pbhjpbhj 23d ago
    Aside from other issues, do you not see a difference between a company committing copyright infringement at global scales never before seen (except with Google Books), who then use the fruit of that to sell a service at a high cost, VERSUS an individual person watching media at home with no profit (where it has been shown that _as a class_ these sorts of infringers spend more on media than other people). Yes, HN often has cliques wth opposing views, but I don't even think that's necessary to recall in order to see a problem with corporations who, in order to make their product, commit copyright infringement of billions of works. These opinions are entirely my own personal views. I do not support tortuous infringement.
deleted 24d ago
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tripzilch 24d ago
What do you mean, it's already robbing me of the ability to discuss techniques with a number of my peers since they decided the mediocre output of LLMs is good enough instead of understanding what they are doing. In addition, a great number of people have decided to stop publishing their code publicly, and discuss techniques except in spaces they can be sure it's a one-on-one with a human being. Some things already got lost.
- phoronixrly 24d ago
  I still do open-source. You just get the code on a CD like the good old times!
- IAmBroom 24d ago
  You're discussing your peers' behaviors, not AI. It's the same as saying "People don't kill people; guns do." Maybe guns(AI) should be regulated, but the primary problem is murderers(lazy peers), not weapons(AI).
  - malfist 24d ago
    Just like with guns, AI is a crime of scope. I can be a murderer with a knife, sure, but how many people can I kill? How many people can I kill if I have a class three license an a full auto gun? I can pirate a news article here or there, sure, but how many news articles can I pirate? How many news articles can I pirate with AI?
    - TeMPOraL 24d ago
      > How many news articles can I pirate with AI? Not much more than with a bash/curl loop. Which, on one hand, AI can write for you, but on the other hand, AI will make you no longer need to pirate those articles in the first place. Also it's not end-user piracy being discussed - it's the act of training AI itself that's accused here to be "robbery of our culture".
  - ndsipa_pomu 24d ago
    Yet countries that have strong regulation of firearms have significantly less murders (and accidental shootings) than countries that don't regulate them. That does suggest that along with murderers, the easy accessibility of firearms is a problem (assuming that the ratio of murderers in different populations is approximately the same).
enraged_camel 24d ago
[flagged]
907qz-qwt5 24d ago
> it's still there There are many refutations to this fallacy from the Slashdot era, but with AI it is even simpler than with music: Clankers are only useful for current events (which most people use them for) by scraping the web and rewording it. This results in direct financial and notoriety losses for the original authors of the websites. To use another Slashdot cliche: "But you knew that already."
- bcye 24d ago
  > which most people use them for Citation needed
anal_reactor 24d ago
AI didn't steal any culture. It just made mediocre culture more accessible. Turns out, most people do like mediocre culture. Previously, public TV channels could at least pretend that people enjoy educational content or classical music. AI exposed that lie. And now we're shocked that the emperor is naked.
MattDaEskimo 24d ago
If we ignore the massive amount of books being destroyed, the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure), the increased difficulty to access public information such as Reddit and Twitter, and lastly ignore the amount of conversations being taken away from the public in favor of LLMs, I would agree.
- skarz 24d ago
  Except books are already destroyed in physical form every single day. My local library has a section near the front for free and/or extremely cheap books ($1) they are desperately trying to get rid of. My impression is that if they are untaken/unsold they will end up in a dumpster. [Edit] Here's an article from 2003 talking about how Random House destroyed up to 25,000 books a day: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/19/fiction.stephenmoss https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/19/fiction.stephe...
  - lenkite 24d ago
    The scale is completely different. It is like comparing a tiny ant to a Star Devouring Shoggoth. Anthropic destroyed millions of books in hardly any time. They are destroying the foundations of civilization https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
    - rpdillon 24d ago
      > They are destroying the foundations of civilization No, they are not. For all the hype around that 404 media article, no one came forward with titles or authors. Turns out the booksellers that sold them those books said they were "dead inventory". If you're going to assert that companies are destroying the foundations of civilization, you're going to have to produce quite a bit more evidence than the (poorly cited) 404 Media article.
      - lenkite 23d ago
cranberryjoe 24d ago
Don’t copy that floppy!
GPerson 24d ago
A distinction without a difference.
lkjdsklf 24d ago
> 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. This logic only works if you believe that IP has no value. Which is, of course, utter nonsense. Microsoft doesn't believe this. Nor do any of the AI labs. Otherwise, they wouldn't have needed to scrape the data in the first place as it had no value. All of their software (and other products) would be developed in the open as there's no point in protecting the IP. They work very hard to protect their own IP so they obviously believe that IP is worth protecting.
- pfortuny 24d ago
  Yep: the problem with IP is exactly the "Property". The texts are economically (even if only for leisure) valuable, so the producer deserves a fair comoensation unless he has explicitly dismissed it. So paying a price for an intelectual product is reasonable. Nothing to do (per se) with property.
  - jacquesm 24d ago
    And if attribution is their coin then they should be properly attributed even if they aren't paid.
nickjj 24d ago
> 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. It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been. I spent 20 years working as a freelancer and 10 years selling tech video courses. I made enough to have a happy life (not a lot but enough to survive), as long as the income kept flowing every month. Nowadays I make nothing from a business I've built up for 2 decades because AI took away most traffic to my site which was the entry point to my business. I actually lose money because course sales have been impacted so heavily that I pay more for hosting than I get in sales. AI is consuming an unimaginable amount of searches which is the gateway for so many businesses. It's preventing people from being discovered on the internet. Not only that but it's taking everyone's content and selling it back to users while keeping all of the profits.
- shevy-java 24d ago
  > It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been. There actually was theft. See how some big corporations slurped data from Libgen and Anna's Archive. Where did they pay for this? See also this article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/03/meta-has-stolen-books-authors-to-protest-in-london-against-ai-trained-using-shadow-library https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/03/meta-has-stole... And similar articles. It is theft - there is no denying in that. All these companies owe us a ton of money. But Trump protects the AI mafia so we won't get compensation for the damage they cause here.
  - deleted 23d ago
    [deleted]
- avaer 24d ago
  > It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been. It's literally stolen IP. One minus epsilon of the corpus did not give informed consent, or get compensated. The fact that it's laundered doesn't make it any less literally stolen.
- 23d ago
shevy-java 24d ago
> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed No, theft has been documented already many times. See how Facebook etc... slurped up data from Anna's Archive, Libgen and so forth. And many more examples here. The law classifies this as theft. Even digital theft is theft according to the law. Since corporations have too much money, nothing will happen, but we all see that this is theft. It is not clear why you do not see this.
copemaxxxing 24d ago
People like you is the reason I hate humanity. You steal and doesn't even have an ounce of morale in your heart. I can't really tell if you are really evil and messed up inside or just stupid and can't reason.
- cindyllm 24d ago
  [dead]
cowanon77 24d ago
I only see 2 consistent world views: either intellectual property is real, or it is a false concept and all information should be free. If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft. If IP is not real, then the algorithms and weights the AI companies have developed should also be free as they are just more information. The status quo of "your knowledge has no protection, but our knowledge is sacred" is the worst of all possible worlds.
- qarl 24d ago
  > 2 consistent world views Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Instead we should try to find the most practical solution that has the most benefit - which will probably be more complex than yes/no.
  - deleted 24d ago
    [deleted]
  - palmotea 24d ago
    > Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior. Intellectual property is as real as private property (which is a lot more elaborate and weird than possession and territoriality, which is the most that has any natural basis). It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished and the other this fundamental sacred thing that should be respected absolutely (as many do).
    - qarl 24d ago
      Yes, that's why I said property (not just IP) is a social construct.
      - palmotea 24d ago
        Yes, I'm agreeing with you.
ChiperSoft 24d ago
> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen Considering its become exceptionally difficult to search for things that used to be easy to find, I have to disagree with you there. The web has been polluted with trash, covering up all the original media with messy imitations.
- nradov 24d ago
  LLMs have made it easier than ever so search for things. I remember fumbling around with Google, trying different combinations of search terms and never hitting useful results. Now I can give a vague or even partially wrong prompt to an LLM and it sort of magically figures out exactly what I actually want and takes me right there, along with a helpful summary and analysis.
testbjjl 24d ago
Content creators are taking steps to prevent bot from walking away without compensation for their visit as if they’d been stolen from. At least Google, in the beginning sent traffic back that could potentially be monetized by the creator.
- somenameforme 24d ago
  Perhaps some. But I'd wager orders of magnitude more are using LLMs to brainstorm if not outright generate content for them, which they are then reframing as their own creation.
  - TeMPOraL 23d ago
    > orders of magnitude more are using LLMs to brainstorm if not outright generate content for them, which they are then reframing as their own creation I doubt it, those are the same group of people anyway. Orders of magnitude more people are using LLMs to brainstorm or generate content for them, which they are then using to solve their own problems and carry on with their life, increasingly solving many more problems for themselves this way, and not publishing any of it. The world isn't made of "content creators" flinging crap around in hopes of monetizing it. Most people have actual jobs.
Lambdanaut 24d ago
Here's the thing. If any of my work is in their model, then I co-own their model as well as everything it makes. I guarantee it's scraped our work. So where's our paychecks.
- TeMPOraL 23d ago
  I don't know, and I don't care. Scaled proportionally to actual contribution, it'll be like $0.000001 / year, and I'm not going to begrudge the AI companies for not paying me a fractional cent, and I'm definitely not going to cry foul and demand stopping progress over that fractional cent they plausibly owe me. Not the least because I'm already getting many orders of magnitude more value each day from them providing me inference as a service.
  - Lambdanaut 23d ago
    I'll gladly adopt your disowned share.
micromacrofoot 24d ago
It is robbery because you're not paying the person that produced the knowledge, you're paying the person that took the knowledge and put a chatbot interface on it. It's different from search engines because you're not even getting the chance to monetize it yourself, you lose the ability to even show some ad for a pittance. Hell you don't even get credited most of the time. Many many people didn't give permission for the data to be ingested and used this way. We've come out of decades of copyright infringement takedowns and pirating lawsuits only to end up in a position where people doing similar things as a corporation are making billions of dollars.
deleted 24d ago
[deleted]
blks 24d ago
We got? We didn’t get anything last time I checked, we are offered to pay rent to access this intelligence, at a discount
- rpdillon 24d ago
  Why does everyone ignore open-weight models in these discussions?
- TeMPOraL 23d ago
  We have free plans and open-weight models you can host yourself, or pay someone for hosting, or host yourself and sell others to recoup the costs. All of these lag SOTA by ~6 months on average, so yes, indeed, the thing you could only pay for half a year ago, is now free for entire world forever, and it only keeps getting better with time.
highspeedbus 24d ago
>it's still there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics The past is still there, but our culture, being a live thing, is pretty much being affected by AI. We now have an artificial intelligence in this loop of exchange of ideas. Slopifying everything in its way. It's a robbery of our future culture, at least.
- TeMPOraL 23d ago
  > It's a robbery of our future culture, at least. That is a different argument entirely, though. Not the one GP presented. On this, I have no concrete views. Sloppifying is real, and AI is short-circuiting "this loop of exchange of ideas", for sure. On the other hand, we had several precedents on this within last 700 years - the printing press, the radio, and the Internet to name the largest three - and culture turned out fine. Different, but fine. AI feels more than this, though, so I'm not putting that much stock in argument from history here.
palmotea 24d ago
> 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. But there's a real [1] transgression there, and attempting to lawyer it away is disingenuous. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it's sort of like if you blocked off the sun, and a farmer complained you stole his land, and then you retort "your land has not been stolen, you still have title and can occupy it." Your actions damaged him. Again, not a perfect analogy, but I think our efforts should go to recognizing the transgression instead of trying to deny it. > 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. We don't have a society where "we got back" anything, and if you weren't aware, this "intelligence" is definitely getting metered. If anything "we" got undercut, and "our" assets lost a lot of their value, while others will get very rich from that loss. Come back with communism, and then maybe you'll have a point. [1] Fuck you, Claude, for making me wince at that.
franczesko 24d ago
Yet IP is processed (without permission, nor payment) and the software benefiting from it has a monthly fee
conartist6 24d ago
Usually that stance means that you're not one of the people making culture. It isn't you that AI communism is stealing from.
philipov 24d ago
The problem is the hypocrisy. They scrape, but don't want others to scrape them. If they act like they've been stolen from when they get scraped, that is a confession of guilt to when they did it themselves. They should be punished according to the same rules they wish to impose on others.
- rpdillon 23d ago
  I really agree with this critique! It's very hard (without hiding behind ToS) to claim that creating the models was A-OK, but distilling them is some sort of ethical breach or attack.
- TeMPOraL 23d ago
  That I can't argue with. "Distillation is theft" is one of the silliest and most hypocritical things uttered in any of the debates surrounding AI.
Betelbuddy 23d ago
>> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there This is good, but will not fly in court. Your honor... I only moved the Picasso...it is still there...
AlecSchueler 23d ago
> the culture has not been stolen - it's still there It's there in much diminished market, one that has been saturated overnight on a scale previously unfathomable. Their art is still there but it has been used against them to obliterate the playing field. > nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. Aren't all of these AI companies selling subscription models for people to create derivative art? > And let's not forget what we got back for this Get back for what, exactly? Didn't you just argue that no theft or sellback has occurred?
augment_me 23d ago
This is true but it gets people who tied their value to outcomes, wealth accumulation, status accumulation upset. The road for this has closed.
jordanb 23d ago
"It's still there" only in a technical sense because it's being buried by the automatic slop machines. It used to be that, no matter what you want to do, there's a video on youtube of some guy who knows what he's doing showing you exactly how to do it. It could be, like, compressing a rear disc brake cylinder on a car or matching fiberglass gel coat colors, or carving a statue out of marble. Theoretically those videos are still in there somewhere, all 15 years old at this point, but you'll not find them with youtube search instead you'll find a million AI slop videos no matter what you query.
boothby 23d ago
> 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". There's a way that many people fear this is true: what you're getting for "free" has some external cost that you aren't taking into account. Cost 1. The environment. Tech companies were once significantly interested in efficiency, their carbon footprint, etc. With the advent of LLMs, this was thrown out the window. Concerned people are now thinking about water footprint, heat footprint, noise footprint, and probably more. These things are hard to put a dollar figure on in a short comment, but the sustanability of a liveable climate for the billions living on this planet is literally priceless. Cost 2. Employment. We face a significant cull of employability -- graphic artists, programmers, mathematicians, paralegals, and more are rightly fearful for the end of their career. If we're getting intelligence for "free" in 2026 dollars, but we can't get jobs in 2030, will all that content still be affordable in 2035? Cost 3. Infinite investor dollars. The AI companies are burning cash at a historically unprecedented rate. This has attracted a lot of attention from traditional investors, like pensions, banks, etc. If all of this ends up in a free product, that doesn't sound like it'll return those investments. And that can crash the economy -- I ask again about real affordability in 2035.
- thewebguyd 23d ago
  > Infinite investor dollars This has another side effect in that it breaks the power that consumers have in the market to have a say in how resources get allocated, by voting with their wallet. The entire AI buildout is non-consensual. Individuals have zero say. We could all refuse to buy AI subscriptions and it would not matter because businesses will still buy, and, investors have decided that we are moving forward with this no matter what, seemingly whether anyone is actually buying or not. AI isn't necessarily unique here, but it is one of the biggest new examples of wealth inequality and how society at large are no longer the ones who get to decide how resources are allocated under a capitalist system, especially when the investor dollars behind it amounts to the GDP of a small nation.
  - intended 23d ago
    And Businesses will buy, because the AI promise is a promise to automate workers away.
snypher 23d ago
>real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits Again with the weasel words. Real people, including individuals? Pretty clear this is written from a pro-business perspective and can be safely dismissed. >"robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up". Well, it is that. Why is it criminal for me to steal a big-business-movie for personal use, but they can just take all my blog posts and sell their deritives to others?
nunez 23d ago
> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen I respectfully request that you get all the way outta here with this take. Artists have caught AI generating literally their own work, for free, at scale. There have been tons of articles on this website about the AI hyperscalers slurping up books, copyrighted works, etc through legal and questionable ways. Even TFA says that the NYT suffered absolutely devastating CTR drops. If you create a blog post about something super esoteric, it will guaranteed end up in the training sets for every big-lab frontier model within 24 hours (probably less) and probably show up in Google's AI Summaries at around the same time. It's also well-documented that their spiders don't honor robots.txt either and blocking them is basically impossible unless you give Cloudflare protection money (since spiders can super easily solve Anubis hashing challenges). If that doesn't sound like theft-as-a-service to you, I don't know what to tell you. All I know is that hosting content ANYWHERE AI labs can get a hold of it is rapidly becoming a fool's errand, and we will all be at a loss for it.
samus 23d ago
Stealing in this case is not about physically removing something from one's possessions, but more about disguising attribution and in many cases also reducing a future income stream.
taurath 23d ago
I have artist friends - asking AI to draw something similar to subjects they've drawn ends up making, line for line, the exact image they created, hallucinated alongside a couple others. They spent decades getting good at their craft. They spent so many years getting paying patrons and customers to commission them. You'll never agree but I think you underestimate how many people consider all that the AI companies have done to be the wealthy stealing and selling things back. > nor are the people involved selling it back in any form I am convinced that the longer one works in AI the less one has any grasp on reality > too cheap to meter Its the most expensive buildout in human history - you can't just split half the cost. The spending is the only significant growth in the US economy. Unless you think that all the datacenters and all that capex are for training?
- augment_me 23d ago
  I have horse & wagon friends - they spent decades understanding the ins and outs of roads, some of them also creatively made up their own routes and roads. However ordering a car with Uber through your phone just gets people to the destination faster, cheaper, more comfortably and reliably using those same roads. This is theft I made up the route first >:(
  - taurath 23d ago
    Yknow, I guess you’re right, human creativity really has no place in your world.
antisthenes 23d ago
> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there It's actually not there. See how many websites have now closed doors or ceased to operate because of constantly being hammered and bombarded by robotic scrapers. For others, it made websites that turned a small profit into unsustainable money pits. Sure, their content might now be ingested into an LLM training set sitting somewhere on proprietary servers. But the site itself (the origin of truth) now does not exist. So no. It actually isn't there. Resting on this falsehood, the rest of your retort makes not much sense.
fwlr 23d ago
reified intelligence on a chip, almost too cheap to meter, “Reified intelligence” is stretching the truth. It is certainly closer to intelligence than anything we’ve come up with before, it can certainly match or beat actual intelligence in some domains, but just as certainly it clearly lacks many features and capabilities of intelligence. “On a chip” is also stretching the truth. The kinds of models that you might point to in support of “reified intelligence” run on things the size of a desktop computer and cost more than a car, which is way off from the scale that “on a chip” suggests. And “almost too cheap to meter” is aggressively false. Users of this service are known to talk incessantly about being metered, it is a daily fact of life for them. Individuals who have free usage for a project commonly report that, had they paid, it would cost five or six figures. Companies have seen enormous bills, some approaching the size of their payroll. And all of this is true for tokens that are dramatically subsidized, by one of the most intense and largest concentrations of capital in history. It is the polar opposite - “almost too expensive to even do, and absolutely must be carefully metered”. In summary, let us indeed not forget what we got back for this: extraordinary distortions of reality evenly intermingled with bald-faced lies.
- TeMPOraL 23d ago
  > It is certainly closer to intelligence than anything we’ve come up with before, it can certainly match or beat actual intelligence in some domains, but just as certainly it clearly lacks many features and capabilities of intelligence. It's not complete or that well-rounded. But it's something that was the domain of speculative science fiction only 5 years ago, and it's rounded enough to be applicable to ~everything to some degree. > The kinds of models that you might point to in support of “reified intelligence” run on things the size of a desktop computer and cost more than a car, which is way off from the scale that “on a chip” suggests. By "on a chip" I meant more "in silica" than literally on a single chip" - though this actually is* true, but those chips aren't cheap. > And “almost too cheap to meter” is aggressively false. Users of this service are known to talk incessantly about being metered, it is a daily fact of life for them. You are looking at power users that use LLMs in agentic coding sessions. Most people just run off free tier of ChatGPT, which is free for them. There are equivalent open-weight models at this level, and while hardware to run one for yourself is expensive even for most westerners, the marginal inference cost is literally dirt cheap, which is why you can get that for near-free from smaller inference providers - or pony up some money, rent a bunch of compute with friends, and become an inference provider yourself. (It's only a tough market because the major vendors are giving out better models than you can run for ~same or lower price than you can offer. Which either way is too cheap to meter in terms of solving useful problem for real people. Again, developers are a special case of power users, as usual.)
tgv 23d ago
> because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses. Not problems, laziness. The way I see students and colleagues use it is to get their work done with less effort. That's its selling point. There are not many real problems LLMs address. > no one has actually been robbed In our society, people get paid for work. If you think society is wrong, fine, but you must state so first. Under common assumptions, all that data has been produced through work, and that work represents value. Taking it for free is therefore theft.
Ydarbleoj 23d ago
> reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West. I think this is quite the pollyannaish perspective and very much inline with those that think if you can take, then take and only apologize when caught.
- TeMPOraL 23d ago
  It's not a perspective, it's a literal fact. We won't get anywhere in these discussion if good chunk of participants cannot admit to the trivially observable facts about the actual objective reality in which they live in.
globular-toast 23d ago
It's become a bit clichéd to say it but I think it's different this time. The kind of "piracy" you're talking about wasn't depriving the authors of anything because you could always make the argument you weren't going to pay for it anyway. If, on the other hand, you were making copies and charging people for them, you could definitely say you were depriving the legitimate authors of that revenue. AI companies are very much doing the latter, not the former. The other part of it is it's not just copying. Previously, if I decided to make a copy of a work without paying, I'm only copying the work, not the author's whole writing style. Now the AI companies are depriving authors of revenue from works they haven't even made yet. If they were able to create a model de novo then they could truly claim it hasn't just been lifted from existing culture.
xingped 23d ago
Every time AI is used it is a theft from artists, programmers, writers, and all creative workers whose work was used to train it without permission or compensation and are now unable to find work or buyers. It is absolutely theft and you're being intentionally disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

wjnc 24d 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 24d 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 24d 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!
  - GlacierFox 24d ago
    There's some nuance there you're purposefully/ignorantly supressing to create a more impactful fundamentalist observation, completely contrary to the comment you described above as : "heart-string-pulling "life's work got appropriated" argument" I think the water is very muddy in regards to this topic and comments like yours really highlight the distain some people have for others that have talking points about with things they create being thrown into a gargantuan 'blender' as you called it.
  - AgentOrange1234 24d ago
    "Give it out for free or serve for peanuts" is doing a lot of work here. The crowd should be skeptical that this will continue given how many times we have seen enshittification unfold before. Before LLMs, "knowledge should be free" was a call to preserve an open playing field where everyone has the ability to access the intellectual labor of humanity so they can contribute, instead of letting a few institutions wall it off for a profit. As knowledge is walled off behind these models, rent seeking will expand, "safety guardrails" will become more onerous, and the masses will lose their access. There are wonderful parallels between this and enclosure in Britain.
    - WarmWash 24d ago
      >instead of letting a few institutions wall it off for a profit. I cannot repeat enough that that is not true, or even remotely close to true. When ChatGPT helps me fix my toilet, saving me a $300 plumber call, I don't cut OAI a check for $300 instead. It is unbelievably easy to harvest more than $20 of value from all the basic plans. Right now, users are overwhelmingly capturing all the value. Even if they triple the price, it's trivial for most workers to easily justify it. We can project any future scenario we want, but right now the labs are only capturing a tiny fraction of the value they are creating. Especially for the crowd here on HN.
- qahr16 24d ago
  Amodei: Check out my 1000 Exabytes torrent collection, which I weaseled out of with a $1.5 billion bribe. The usual human reading information on the internet does nothing with it. They don't adapt the style, they don't translate, they don't reblog a modified version. The ones that do have been criticized for stealing blog posts already before AI.
- NateEag 24d ago
  Yes, in a huge crowd of people, you will get differing opinions. Do you have any other obvious facts you'd like to pretend are somehow relevant?
  - WarmWash 24d ago
    Because of the nature of upvoting on social media, we can pretty accurately dial in on what the crowds consensus is. Your response makes sense when we are pulling random marbles from a bag, like old school forums, but social media abandoned that style of commentary long ago.
    - NateEag 23d ago
      I don't think that holds at all. There are so many variables that go into upvoting and downvoting, and we can't even see the actual scores on HN posts. The data you refer to isn't available, AFAIK, and even if it were we'd have to account for the hundreds of confounding variables that contribute to post scores being what they are.
- tmcb 24d ago
  People with a 132TB media collection don’t usually act as if they wrote and directed The Godfather. AI steals by lacking the ability to properly do either attribution and citation, whether this is accidental or by design. Downloading an existing PhD thesis without permission is very much different from submitting an existing PhD thesis as yours.
- duskdozer 24d ago
  I'd bet if you asked a bunch of people off the street, you'd have a number of different takes on the ethics of stealing a loaf of bread, depending who stole it, from whom, and why.
- sham1 24d ago
  An individual pirate is morally a lot less objectionable than the capitalist class pirating from literally everyone else. Yeah sure, it's on the open Internet, but then again, the capitalists could also actually adhere to the licensing terms of the free software they're hoovering up and all that. These are the same people who want to enforce all kinds of EULAs against the commons, employing measures such as DRM to protect their "intellectual property", so why is it suddenly okay to not comply with IP when it's them doing the infringement? And that's just with software, but this also affects other creative endeavours. Also the individual HN user's 132 TB Plex server doesn't suck up ludicrous amounts of resources from the commons.
- pbhjpbhj 23d ago
  Aside from other issues, do you not see a difference between a company committing copyright infringement at global scales never before seen (except with Google Books), who then use the fruit of that to sell a service at a high cost, VERSUS an individual person watching media at home with no profit (where it has been shown that _as a class_ these sorts of infringers spend more on media than other people). Yes, HN often has cliques wth opposing views, but I don't even think that's necessary to recall in order to see a problem with corporations who, in order to make their product, commit copyright infringement of billions of works. These opinions are entirely my own personal views. I do not support tortuous infringement.

deleted 24d ago

[deleted]

tripzilch 24d ago

What do you mean, it's already robbing me of the ability to discuss techniques with a number of my peers since they decided the mediocre output of LLMs is good enough instead of understanding what they are doing. In addition, a great number of people have decided to stop publishing their code publicly, and discuss techniques except in spaces they can be sure it's a one-on-one with a human being. Some things already got lost.

phoronixrly 24d ago
I still do open-source. You just get the code on a CD like the good old times!
IAmBroom 24d ago
You're discussing your peers' behaviors, not AI. It's the same as saying "People don't kill people; guns do." Maybe guns(AI) should be regulated, but the primary problem is murderers(lazy peers), not weapons(AI).
- malfist 24d ago
  Just like with guns, AI is a crime of scope. I can be a murderer with a knife, sure, but how many people can I kill? How many people can I kill if I have a class three license an a full auto gun? I can pirate a news article here or there, sure, but how many news articles can I pirate? How many news articles can I pirate with AI?
  - TeMPOraL 24d ago
    > How many news articles can I pirate with AI? Not much more than with a bash/curl loop. Which, on one hand, AI can write for you, but on the other hand, AI will make you no longer need to pirate those articles in the first place. Also it's not end-user piracy being discussed - it's the act of training AI itself that's accused here to be "robbery of our culture".
- ndsipa_pomu 24d ago
  Yet countries that have strong regulation of firearms have significantly less murders (and accidental shootings) than countries that don't regulate them. That does suggest that along with murderers, the easy accessibility of firearms is a problem (assuming that the ratio of murderers in different populations is approximately the same).

enraged_camel 24d ago

[flagged]

907qz-qwt5 24d ago

> it's still there There are many refutations to this fallacy from the Slashdot era, but with AI it is even simpler than with music: Clankers are only useful for current events (which most people use them for) by scraping the web and rewording it. This results in direct financial and notoriety losses for the original authors of the websites. To use another Slashdot cliche: "But you knew that already."

bcye 24d ago
> which most people use them for Citation needed

anal_reactor 24d ago

AI didn't steal any culture. It just made mediocre culture more accessible. Turns out, most people do like mediocre culture. Previously, public TV channels could at least pretend that people enjoy educational content or classical music. AI exposed that lie. And now we're shocked that the emperor is naked.

MattDaEskimo 24d ago

If we ignore the massive amount of books being destroyed, the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure), the increased difficulty to access public information such as Reddit and Twitter, and lastly ignore the amount of conversations being taken away from the public in favor of LLMs, I would agree.

skarz 24d ago
Except books are already destroyed in physical form every single day. My local library has a section near the front for free and/or extremely cheap books ($1) they are desperately trying to get rid of. My impression is that if they are untaken/unsold they will end up in a dumpster. [Edit] Here's an article from 2003 talking about how Random House destroyed up to 25,000 books a day: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/19/fiction.stephenmoss https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/19/fiction.stephe...
- lenkite 24d ago
  The scale is completely different. It is like comparing a tiny ant to a Star Devouring Shoggoth. Anthropic destroyed millions of books in hardly any time. They are destroying the foundations of civilization https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
  - rpdillon 24d ago
    > They are destroying the foundations of civilization No, they are not. For all the hype around that 404 media article, no one came forward with titles or authors. Turns out the booksellers that sold them those books said they were "dead inventory". If you're going to assert that companies are destroying the foundations of civilization, you're going to have to produce quite a bit more evidence than the (poorly cited) 404 Media article.
    - lenkite 23d ago

cranberryjoe 24d ago

Don’t copy that floppy!

GPerson 24d ago

A distinction without a difference.

lkjdsklf 24d ago

pfortuny 24d ago
Yep: the problem with IP is exactly the "Property". The texts are economically (even if only for leisure) valuable, so the producer deserves a fair comoensation unless he has explicitly dismissed it. So paying a price for an intelectual product is reasonable. Nothing to do (per se) with property.
- jacquesm 24d ago
  And if attribution is their coin then they should be properly attributed even if they aren't paid.

nickjj 24d ago

> 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. It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been. I spent 20 years working as a freelancer and 10 years selling tech video courses. I made enough to have a happy life (not a lot but enough to survive), as long as the income kept flowing every month. Nowadays I make nothing from a business I've built up for 2 decades because AI took away most traffic to my site which was the entry point to my business. I actually lose money because course sales have been impacted so heavily that I pay more for hosting than I get in sales. AI is consuming an unimaginable amount of searches which is the gateway for so many businesses. It's preventing people from being discovered on the internet. Not only that but it's taking everyone's content and selling it back to users while keeping all of the profits.

shevy-java 24d ago
> It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been. There actually was theft. See how some big corporations slurped data from Libgen and Anna's Archive. Where did they pay for this? See also this article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/03/meta-has-stolen-books-authors-to-protest-in-london-against-ai-trained-using-shadow-library https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/03/meta-has-stole... And similar articles. It is theft - there is no denying in that. All these companies owe us a ton of money. But Trump protects the AI mafia so we won't get compensation for the damage they cause here.
- deleted 23d ago
  [deleted]
avaer 24d ago
> It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been. It's literally stolen IP. One minus epsilon of the corpus did not give informed consent, or get compensated. The fact that it's laundered doesn't make it any less literally stolen.
23d ago

shevy-java 24d ago

> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed No, theft has been documented already many times. See how Facebook etc... slurped up data from Anna's Archive, Libgen and so forth. And many more examples here. The law classifies this as theft. Even digital theft is theft according to the law. Since corporations have too much money, nothing will happen, but we all see that this is theft. It is not clear why you do not see this.

copemaxxxing 24d ago

People like you is the reason I hate humanity. You steal and doesn't even have an ounce of morale in your heart. I can't really tell if you are really evil and messed up inside or just stupid and can't reason.

cindyllm 24d ago
[dead]

cowanon77 24d ago

I only see 2 consistent world views: either intellectual property is real, or it is a false concept and all information should be free. If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft. If IP is not real, then the algorithms and weights the AI companies have developed should also be free as they are just more information. The status quo of "your knowledge has no protection, but our knowledge is sacred" is the worst of all possible worlds.

qarl 24d ago
> 2 consistent world views Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Instead we should try to find the most practical solution that has the most benefit - which will probably be more complex than yes/no.
- deleted 24d ago
  [deleted]
- palmotea 24d ago
  > Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior. Intellectual property is as real as private property (which is a lot more elaborate and weird than possession and territoriality, which is the most that has any natural basis). It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished and the other this fundamental sacred thing that should be respected absolutely (as many do).
  - qarl 24d ago
    Yes, that's why I said property (not just IP) is a social construct.
    - palmotea 24d ago
      Yes, I'm agreeing with you.

ChiperSoft 24d ago

> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen Considering its become exceptionally difficult to search for things that used to be easy to find, I have to disagree with you there. The web has been polluted with trash, covering up all the original media with messy imitations.

nradov 24d ago
LLMs have made it easier than ever so search for things. I remember fumbling around with Google, trying different combinations of search terms and never hitting useful results. Now I can give a vague or even partially wrong prompt to an LLM and it sort of magically figures out exactly what I actually want and takes me right there, along with a helpful summary and analysis.

testbjjl 24d ago

Content creators are taking steps to prevent bot from walking away without compensation for their visit as if they’d been stolen from. At least Google, in the beginning sent traffic back that could potentially be monetized by the creator.

somenameforme 24d ago
Perhaps some. But I'd wager orders of magnitude more are using LLMs to brainstorm if not outright generate content for them, which they are then reframing as their own creation.
- TeMPOraL 23d ago
  > orders of magnitude more are using LLMs to brainstorm if not outright generate content for them, which they are then reframing as their own creation I doubt it, those are the same group of people anyway. Orders of magnitude more people are using LLMs to brainstorm or generate content for them, which they are then using to solve their own problems and carry on with their life, increasingly solving many more problems for themselves this way, and not publishing any of it. The world isn't made of "content creators" flinging crap around in hopes of monetizing it. Most people have actual jobs.

Lambdanaut 24d ago

Here's the thing. If any of my work is in their model, then I co-own their model as well as everything it makes. I guarantee it's scraped our work. So where's our paychecks.

TeMPOraL 23d ago
I don't know, and I don't care. Scaled proportionally to actual contribution, it'll be like $0.000001 / year, and I'm not going to begrudge the AI companies for not paying me a fractional cent, and I'm definitely not going to cry foul and demand stopping progress over that fractional cent they plausibly owe me. Not the least because I'm already getting many orders of magnitude more value each day from them providing me inference as a service.
- Lambdanaut 23d ago
  I'll gladly adopt your disowned share.

micromacrofoot 24d ago

It is robbery because you're not paying the person that produced the knowledge, you're paying the person that took the knowledge and put a chatbot interface on it. It's different from search engines because you're not even getting the chance to monetize it yourself, you lose the ability to even show some ad for a pittance. Hell you don't even get credited most of the time. Many many people didn't give permission for the data to be ingested and used this way. We've come out of decades of copyright infringement takedowns and pirating lawsuits only to end up in a position where people doing similar things as a corporation are making billions of dollars.

deleted 24d ago

[deleted]

blks 24d ago

We got? We didn’t get anything last time I checked, we are offered to pay rent to access this intelligence, at a discount

rpdillon 24d ago
Why does everyone ignore open-weight models in these discussions?
TeMPOraL 23d ago
We have free plans and open-weight models you can host yourself, or pay someone for hosting, or host yourself and sell others to recoup the costs. All of these lag SOTA by ~6 months on average, so yes, indeed, the thing you could only pay for half a year ago, is now free for entire world forever, and it only keeps getting better with time.

highspeedbus 24d ago

>it's still there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics The past is still there, but our culture, being a live thing, is pretty much being affected by AI. We now have an artificial intelligence in this loop of exchange of ideas. Slopifying everything in its way. It's a robbery of our future culture, at least.

TeMPOraL 23d ago
> It's a robbery of our future culture, at least. That is a different argument entirely, though. Not the one GP presented. On this, I have no concrete views. Sloppifying is real, and AI is short-circuiting "this loop of exchange of ideas", for sure. On the other hand, we had several precedents on this within last 700 years - the printing press, the radio, and the Internet to name the largest three - and culture turned out fine. Different, but fine. AI feels more than this, though, so I'm not putting that much stock in argument from history here.

palmotea 24d ago

> 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. But there's a real [1] transgression there, and attempting to lawyer it away is disingenuous. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it's sort of like if you blocked off the sun, and a farmer complained you stole his land, and then you retort "your land has not been stolen, you still have title and can occupy it." Your actions damaged him. Again, not a perfect analogy, but I think our efforts should go to recognizing the transgression instead of trying to deny it. > 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. We don't have a society where "we got back" anything, and if you weren't aware, this "intelligence" is definitely getting metered. If anything "we" got undercut, and "our" assets lost a lot of their value, while others will get very rich from that loss. Come back with communism, and then maybe you'll have a point. [1] Fuck you, Claude, for making me wince at that.

franczesko 24d ago

Yet IP is processed (without permission, nor payment) and the software benefiting from it has a monthly fee

conartist6 24d ago

Usually that stance means that you're not one of the people making culture. It isn't you that AI communism is stealing from.

philipov 24d ago

The problem is the hypocrisy. They scrape, but don't want others to scrape them. If they act like they've been stolen from when they get scraped, that is a confession of guilt to when they did it themselves. They should be punished according to the same rules they wish to impose on others.

rpdillon 23d ago
I really agree with this critique! It's very hard (without hiding behind ToS) to claim that creating the models was A-OK, but distilling them is some sort of ethical breach or attack.
TeMPOraL 23d ago
That I can't argue with. "Distillation is theft" is one of the silliest and most hypocritical things uttered in any of the debates surrounding AI.

Betelbuddy 23d ago

>> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there This is good, but will not fly in court. Your honor... I only moved the Picasso...it is still there...

AlecSchueler 23d ago

> the culture has not been stolen - it's still there It's there in much diminished market, one that has been saturated overnight on a scale previously unfathomable. Their art is still there but it has been used against them to obliterate the playing field. > nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. Aren't all of these AI companies selling subscription models for people to create derivative art? > And let's not forget what we got back for this Get back for what, exactly? Didn't you just argue that no theft or sellback has occurred?

augment_me 23d ago

This is true but it gets people who tied their value to outcomes, wealth accumulation, status accumulation upset. The road for this has closed.

jordanb 23d ago

"It's still there" only in a technical sense because it's being buried by the automatic slop machines. It used to be that, no matter what you want to do, there's a video on youtube of some guy who knows what he's doing showing you exactly how to do it. It could be, like, compressing a rear disc brake cylinder on a car or matching fiberglass gel coat colors, or carving a statue out of marble. Theoretically those videos are still in there somewhere, all 15 years old at this point, but you'll not find them with youtube search instead you'll find a million AI slop videos no matter what you query.

boothby 23d ago

> 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". There's a way that many people fear this is true: what you're getting for "free" has some external cost that you aren't taking into account. Cost 1. The environment. Tech companies were once significantly interested in efficiency, their carbon footprint, etc. With the advent of LLMs, this was thrown out the window. Concerned people are now thinking about water footprint, heat footprint, noise footprint, and probably more. These things are hard to put a dollar figure on in a short comment, but the sustanability of a liveable climate for the billions living on this planet is literally priceless. Cost 2. Employment. We face a significant cull of employability -- graphic artists, programmers, mathematicians, paralegals, and more are rightly fearful for the end of their career. If we're getting intelligence for "free" in 2026 dollars, but we can't get jobs in 2030, will all that content still be affordable in 2035? Cost 3. Infinite investor dollars. The AI companies are burning cash at a historically unprecedented rate. This has attracted a lot of attention from traditional investors, like pensions, banks, etc. If all of this ends up in a free product, that doesn't sound like it'll return those investments. And that can crash the economy -- I ask again about real affordability in 2035.

thewebguyd 23d ago
> Infinite investor dollars This has another side effect in that it breaks the power that consumers have in the market to have a say in how resources get allocated, by voting with their wallet. The entire AI buildout is non-consensual. Individuals have zero say. We could all refuse to buy AI subscriptions and it would not matter because businesses will still buy, and, investors have decided that we are moving forward with this no matter what, seemingly whether anyone is actually buying or not. AI isn't necessarily unique here, but it is one of the biggest new examples of wealth inequality and how society at large are no longer the ones who get to decide how resources are allocated under a capitalist system, especially when the investor dollars behind it amounts to the GDP of a small nation.
- intended 23d ago
  And Businesses will buy, because the AI promise is a promise to automate workers away.

snypher 23d ago

>real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits Again with the weasel words. Real people, including individuals? Pretty clear this is written from a pro-business perspective and can be safely dismissed. >"robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up". Well, it is that. Why is it criminal for me to steal a big-business-movie for personal use, but they can just take all my blog posts and sell their deritives to others?

nunez 23d ago

> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen I respectfully request that you get all the way outta here with this take. Artists have caught AI generating literally their own work, for free, at scale. There have been tons of articles on this website about the AI hyperscalers slurping up books, copyrighted works, etc through legal and questionable ways. Even TFA says that the NYT suffered absolutely devastating CTR drops. If you create a blog post about something super esoteric, it will guaranteed end up in the training sets for every big-lab frontier model within 24 hours (probably less) and probably show up in Google's AI Summaries at around the same time. It's also well-documented that their spiders don't honor robots.txt either and blocking them is basically impossible unless you give Cloudflare protection money (since spiders can super easily solve Anubis hashing challenges). If that doesn't sound like theft-as-a-service to you, I don't know what to tell you. All I know is that hosting content ANYWHERE AI labs can get a hold of it is rapidly becoming a fool's errand, and we will all be at a loss for it.

samus 23d ago

Stealing in this case is not about physically removing something from one's possessions, but more about disguising attribution and in many cases also reducing a future income stream.

taurath 23d ago

I have artist friends - asking AI to draw something similar to subjects they've drawn ends up making, line for line, the exact image they created, hallucinated alongside a couple others. They spent decades getting good at their craft. They spent so many years getting paying patrons and customers to commission them. You'll never agree but I think you underestimate how many people consider all that the AI companies have done to be the wealthy stealing and selling things back. > nor are the people involved selling it back in any form I am convinced that the longer one works in AI the less one has any grasp on reality > too cheap to meter Its the most expensive buildout in human history - you can't just split half the cost. The spending is the only significant growth in the US economy. Unless you think that all the datacenters and all that capex are for training?

augment_me 23d ago
I have horse & wagon friends - they spent decades understanding the ins and outs of roads, some of them also creatively made up their own routes and roads. However ordering a car with Uber through your phone just gets people to the destination faster, cheaper, more comfortably and reliably using those same roads. This is theft I made up the route first >:(
- taurath 23d ago
  Yknow, I guess you’re right, human creativity really has no place in your world.

antisthenes 23d ago

> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there It's actually not there. See how many websites have now closed doors or ceased to operate because of constantly being hammered and bombarded by robotic scrapers. For others, it made websites that turned a small profit into unsustainable money pits. Sure, their content might now be ingested into an LLM training set sitting somewhere on proprietary servers. But the site itself (the origin of truth) now does not exist. So no. It actually isn't there. Resting on this falsehood, the rest of your retort makes not much sense.

fwlr 23d ago

reified intelligence on a chip, almost too cheap to meter, “Reified intelligence” is stretching the truth. It is certainly closer to intelligence than anything we’ve come up with before, it can certainly match or beat actual intelligence in some domains, but just as certainly it clearly lacks many features and capabilities of intelligence. “On a chip” is also stretching the truth. The kinds of models that you might point to in support of “reified intelligence” run on things the size of a desktop computer and cost more than a car, which is way off from the scale that “on a chip” suggests. And “almost too cheap to meter” is aggressively false. Users of this service are known to talk incessantly about being metered, it is a daily fact of life for them. Individuals who have free usage for a project commonly report that, had they paid, it would cost five or six figures. Companies have seen enormous bills, some approaching the size of their payroll. And all of this is true for tokens that are dramatically subsidized, by one of the most intense and largest concentrations of capital in history. It is the polar opposite - “almost too expensive to even do, and absolutely must be carefully metered”. In summary, let us indeed not forget what we got back for this: extraordinary distortions of reality evenly intermingled with bald-faced lies.

TeMPOraL 23d ago
> It is certainly closer to intelligence than anything we’ve come up with before, it can certainly match or beat actual intelligence in some domains, but just as certainly it clearly lacks many features and capabilities of intelligence. It's not complete or that well-rounded. But it's something that was the domain of speculative science fiction only 5 years ago, and it's rounded enough to be applicable to ~everything to some degree. > The kinds of models that you might point to in support of “reified intelligence” run on things the size of a desktop computer and cost more than a car, which is way off from the scale that “on a chip” suggests. By "on a chip" I meant more "in silica" than literally on a single chip" - though this actually is* true, but those chips aren't cheap. > And “almost too cheap to meter” is aggressively false. Users of this service are known to talk incessantly about being metered, it is a daily fact of life for them. You are looking at power users that use LLMs in agentic coding sessions. Most people just run off free tier of ChatGPT, which is free for them. There are equivalent open-weight models at this level, and while hardware to run one for yourself is expensive even for most westerners, the marginal inference cost is literally dirt cheap, which is why you can get that for near-free from smaller inference providers - or pony up some money, rent a bunch of compute with friends, and become an inference provider yourself. (It's only a tough market because the major vendors are giving out better models than you can run for ~same or lower price than you can offer. Which either way is too cheap to meter in terms of solving useful problem for real people. Again, developers are a special case of power users, as usual.)

tgv 23d ago

> because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses. Not problems, laziness. The way I see students and colleagues use it is to get their work done with less effort. That's its selling point. There are not many real problems LLMs address. > no one has actually been robbed In our society, people get paid for work. If you think society is wrong, fine, but you must state so first. Under common assumptions, all that data has been produced through work, and that work represents value. Taking it for free is therefore theft.

Ydarbleoj 23d ago

> reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West. I think this is quite the pollyannaish perspective and very much inline with those that think if you can take, then take and only apologize when caught.

TeMPOraL 23d ago
It's not a perspective, it's a literal fact. We won't get anywhere in these discussion if good chunk of participants cannot admit to the trivially observable facts about the actual objective reality in which they live in.

globular-toast 23d ago

It's become a bit clichéd to say it but I think it's different this time. The kind of "piracy" you're talking about wasn't depriving the authors of anything because you could always make the argument you weren't going to pay for it anyway. If, on the other hand, you were making copies and charging people for them, you could definitely say you were depriving the legitimate authors of that revenue. AI companies are very much doing the latter, not the former. The other part of it is it's not just copying. Previously, if I decided to make a copy of a work without paying, I'm only copying the work, not the author's whole writing style. Now the AI companies are depriving authors of revenue from works they haven't even made yet. If they were able to create a model de novo then they could truly claim it hasn't just been lifted from existing culture.

xingped 23d ago

Every time AI is used it is a theft from artists, programmers, writers, and all creative workers whose work was used to train it without permission or compensation and are now unable to find work or buyers. It is absolutely theft and you're being intentionally disingenuous to suggest otherwise.