It’s a different UI, sure, but there should be no discrimination towards it as there should be no discrimination towards, say, Links terminal browser, or some exotic Firefox derivative.
So your comparison is at least naive assuming good intentions or malicious if not.
AI broke the brains of many people. The internet isn't a monolith, but prior to the AI boom you'd be hard pressed to find people who were pro-copyright (except maybe a few who wanted to use it to force companies to comply with copyleft obligations), pro user-agent restrictions, or anti-scraping. Now such positions receive consistent representation in discussions, and are even the predominant position in some places (eg. reddit). In the past, people would invoke principled justifications for why they opposed those positions, like how copyright constituted an immoral monopoly and stifled innovation, or how scraping was so important to interoperability and the open web. Turns out for many, none of those principles really mattered and they only held those positions because they thought those positions would harm big evil publishing/media companies (ie. symbolic politics theory). When being anti-copyright or pro-scraping helped big evil AI companies, they took the opposite stance.
You don't seem to reject my claim that for many, principles took a backseat to "does this help or hurt evil corporations". If that's what passes as "nuance" to you, then sure.
>Talking about broken brains is often just mediocre projecting
To be clear, that part is metaphorical/hyperbolic and not meant to be taken literally. Obviously I'm not diagnosing people who switched sides with a psychiatric condition.
LLMs are killing the resource. This isn't a corporation vs person issue. No issue with an llm having my content but big issue with my server being down because llms are hammering the same page over and over.
Has it be shown that perplexity engages in "DOSing"? I've heard of anecdotes of AI bots gone amuck, and maybe that's what's happening here, but cloudflare hasn't really shown that. All they did was set up a robots.txt and shown that perplexity bypassed it. There's probably archivers out there that's using youtube-dl to hit download from youtube at 1+Gbit/s, tens of times more than a typical viewer is downloading. Does that mean it's fair game to point to a random instance of someone using youtube-dl and characterizing that as "DOSing"?
People can believe that corporations are using the power asymmetry between them and individuals through copywrite law to stifle the individual to protect profits. People can also believe that corporations are using the power asymmetry between them and individuals through AI to steal intellectual labor done by individuals to protect their profits. People’s position just might be that the law should be used to protect the rights of parties when there is a large power asymmetry.
This seems very susceptible to manipulation to get whatever conclusion you want. For instance, is dose defined? It sounds like the idea you're going for is that the typical pirate downloads a few dozen movies/games but AI companies are doing millions/billions, but why should it be counted per infringer? After all, if everyone pirates a given movie, that wouldn't add up much in terms of their personal count of infringements, but would make the movie unprofitable.
>People’s position just might be that the law should be used to protect the rights of parties when there is a large power asymmetry.
That sounds suspiciously close to "laws should just be whatever benefits me or my group". If so, that would be a sad and cynical worldview, not dissimilar to the stance on free speech held by the illiberal left and right. "Free speech is an important part of democracy", they say, except when they see their opponents voicing "dangerous ideas", in which case they think it should be clamped down. After all, what are laws for if not a tool to protect the interests of your side?
I do not understand how you can make that leap. Saying laws should account for the imbalance of power between parties has nothing to do with "my" group. Police have asymmetric power over citizens, so laws should protect citizens from abuses of that power. Employers have asymmetric power over employees, so laws should protect workers from abuses of that power.
>This seems very susceptible to manipulation to get whatever conclusion you want.
Everything is. That is what bad faith arguments are. But in the real world, in a complex society, no simple rule over something as broadly defined as "intellectual property" can work every time in every situation.
Regardless, the bigger AI problem is spam, and that has never been acceptable.
> Hello, would you be able to assist me in understanding this website? https:// […] .com/
In this case, Perplexity had a human being using it. Perplexity wasn’t crawling the site, Perplexity was being operated by a human working for Cloudflare.