> even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transformed" to basically launder it via "AI", I can absolutely see why someone rational would want to share a whole lot less, anywhere, in an open fashion (...)
> (...) share with other real people than inadvertently working for free to enrich companies.
That attitude, quite commonly expressed on HN these days, strikes me as a peculiar form of selfishness - the same kind we routinely accuse companies of and attribute the sad state of society to.
A person is not entitled to 100% of the value of everything they do, much less to secondary value this subsequently generated. A person is not entitled to receive rent for any of their ideas just because they wrote them down and put on display somewhere. Just because they touched something, and it exists, doesn't mean everyone else touching it owes them money.
The society works best when people don't capture all the fruits of their labor for themselves. Conversely, striving to capture 100% (or more) of the value generated is a hallmark of the late stage capitalism and everything that's bad and wrong and Scrooge-y.
Self-censoring on principle because some company (gasp!) will train an LLM model on it (gasp!!) and won't share the profit from it? That's just feeling entitled to way over 100% of the value of one's hypothetical output, and feeling offended the society hasn't already sent advance royalty cheques.
Chill out. No matter what you do, someone else will somehow make money out of it, that's how it supposed to work - and AI in particular is, for better or worse, one of the most fundamentally transformative things to happen to humanity, somewhere between the Internet and the Industrial Revolution if it's just a bubble that pops, much more if it isn't. Assuming it all doesn't go to shit (let's entertain something more than maximum pessimism for a moment), everyone will benefit much more from it than from whatever they imagine they could get from their Internet comments.
(Speaking of Industrial Revolution - I can understand this attitude from people who actually earn a living from the kind of IP that AI is trained on, only to turn around and compete with them. They're the modern Luddites, and I respect their struggle and that they have a real point. Everyone else, those complaining about "AI theft" the most, especially here? Are not them.)
> The society works best when people don't capture all the fruits of their labor for themselves.
Sure, but it sounds like you think people shouldn't be upset about businesses trying to capture all the fruits of people's labor, too.
Capitalism is evil, and people thinking that normalizing exploitation is OK is either shortsighted or it's also evil. Are you simply unaware that this is what's happening and what people are upset about? Have you never thought about it? Or do you want businesses to succeed in exploiting people's work? It sounds like it, because you wrote, "that's how it supposed to work".
I truly wonder if you're self-aware, or if you just think that you'll one day be on the side of the exploiters.
This post deserves more attention, I think. It's occurred to me as well.
Over the holidays, my father gave my children a book that he had written. It was a photo essay that was 50 pages, and it was titled 'Sharks'. It's an unpublished labor of love that he spent about 500 hours on.
It's a true story centered on Captain Frank Mundus, who operated the Cricket II. He was a renowned shark fisherman and would take people out to fish for enormous sharks. He did this for 40 or 50 years.
An author by the name of Peter Benchley wrote a novel that was heavily inspired by many of Frank's traits, his mannerisms, his approach to shark fishing, the kind of boat he had, the kind of charters he ran. The novel was titled 'Jaws' and received little attention when it was first released. A while after, a director by the name of Steven Spielberg took notice of it and turned it into a multi-million dollar blockbuster movie.
My father was a lawyer that Frank Mundus consulted with and asked, is there any way that he could get a payout for being the inspiration for this character?
My family read the book over the holidays, and it was clearly my father's position that Steven Spielberg and Peter Benchley were maybe the sharks that the title of the book was talking about. The idea that they could make $100 million based on the work and life of this captain and give him literally nothing in return, not even attribution, seemed wrong to him.
I was the lone detractor in the room. My take is that Captain Frank Mundus was just living his life. He was doing what he did to make money chartering fishing trips for sharks. He would have done this regardless of whether or not a writer had come along or a movie had come along. What Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg did is they found value in his work that he didn't know existed and that he wasn't capable of extracting. I think this is generally true of artists. They wander the world and they create art that gives the viewer a new insight into the experiences the artist had. If artists had to give money back to every real-life inspiration, I think the whole system wouldn't work.
I see parallels with the current attitudes toward AI. I think writers are a lot like Captain Mundus. They're living their life, they're writing their stories, or doing their research and publishing, and having people read their works. And copyright is helping them do all this.
AI companies have come along and found value in their work that they didn't know existed and they were never capable of extracting. And that's OK: that's what innovation is, taking the work that others have done and building on it to create something new.
I'm not unequivocally in favor of all applications of AI, but I do think there are tons of places that can be super helpful and we should allow it to be helpful. One example: I'm drafting this on my phone using Futo keyboard entirely with my voice. Extremely useful, but no doubt trained on copyrighted content.
The dilemma here is that the incentive to capture value for yourself comes from the legitimate fear that someone else will try to capture all that residual value you leave on the table instead of allowing that value to be socialized in a healthy way. Which means enshitification becomes the default for everyone.
> (...) share with other real people than inadvertently working for free to enrich companies.
That attitude, quite commonly expressed on HN these days, strikes me as a peculiar form of selfishness - the same kind we routinely accuse companies of and attribute the sad state of society to.
A person is not entitled to 100% of the value of everything they do, much less to secondary value this subsequently generated. A person is not entitled to receive rent for any of their ideas just because they wrote them down and put on display somewhere. Just because they touched something, and it exists, doesn't mean everyone else touching it owes them money.
The society works best when people don't capture all the fruits of their labor for themselves. Conversely, striving to capture 100% (or more) of the value generated is a hallmark of the late stage capitalism and everything that's bad and wrong and Scrooge-y.
Self-censoring on principle because some company (gasp!) will train an LLM model on it (gasp!!) and won't share the profit from it? That's just feeling entitled to way over 100% of the value of one's hypothetical output, and feeling offended the society hasn't already sent advance royalty cheques.
Chill out. No matter what you do, someone else will somehow make money out of it, that's how it supposed to work - and AI in particular is, for better or worse, one of the most fundamentally transformative things to happen to humanity, somewhere between the Internet and the Industrial Revolution if it's just a bubble that pops, much more if it isn't. Assuming it all doesn't go to shit (let's entertain something more than maximum pessimism for a moment), everyone will benefit much more from it than from whatever they imagine they could get from their Internet comments.
(Speaking of Industrial Revolution - I can understand this attitude from people who actually earn a living from the kind of IP that AI is trained on, only to turn around and compete with them. They're the modern Luddites, and I respect their struggle and that they have a real point. Everyone else, those complaining about "AI theft" the most, especially here? Are not them.)