Think about how it feels when you toil on a hard problem, do your best work, release it to the work in the spirit of openness and sharing
Only to have a machine ingest, compress, and reiterate your work indefinitely without attribution.
Only to have a machine ingest, compress, and reiterate your work indefinitely without attribution.
Everything I write, every thought I have, and the output of my every creative endeavor is profoundly shaped by the work of others that I have ingested, compressed, and iterated on over the course of my lifetime, yet I have the audacity to call it my own. Any meager success I may have, I attribute to naught but my own ingenosity.
It is the humanness that is the difference, that which exists outside the abstraction of the imposed categories. The human cannot compete with the machine which ingests ALL works and renders the patterns easily available. The artist toiled to perfect those patterns, and now is no longer granted the decency of reaping the fruits of their labors. Humans can give, the machine can only take.
None of these changes came without losses. Writing eroded our capacity to remember, printing fueled decades of bloody religious conflict, photography harmed portrait artists, audio recordings wrecked social collaborative parlor music, computers fucked up our spelling & arithmetic, and the Internet... don't get me started.
Ultimately there is no going back, we will change and adapt to our new capabilities. Some will be harmed and some will be left behind. So turns the wheel of progress, I don't think anyone can stop it.
This isn't an answer, this is just incoherent, circular rambling.
We write open source software so everyone can learn and benefit from it. But why do we not like it when they are being trained on them and allow normies to use it as well?
We want news, knowledge and information to be spread everywhere. So why don't we share all of our books, articles and blogs openly to any AI companies that want to use them? We should all want to have our work to be used by everyone more easily.
Personally, I don't have any fundamental refutation to this. There's a sense that it is wrong. I can somewhat articulate why its wrong in term of control and incentives. But those are not well formed just yet.
I think the "wrongness" would go away, for me anyways, if we found a way that everyone was still remunerated in some way when this sharing occurred.
A lá, the vision of what crypto ought to have been: Every single thing created and shared has a .000xx cent value and as it makes it's way around being used/shared/iterated upon just sends those royalty checks to the "creator" always, forever.
Only to have a machine ingest, compress, and reiterate your work indefinitely without attribution.
I get that the purpose of IP laws are psychological, rather than moral. A culture where people feel as though they can personally benefit from their work is going to have higher technological and scientific output, which is certainly good, even if the means of producing that good are sort of artificial and selfish.
It's not hard to imagine, or maybe dream of, a world where the motivation for research and development is not just personal gain. But we have to work with the world we have, not the world we want, don't we...
Nobody will starve themselves, even if doing so will feed hundreds of others.
Neither. They are purely economic. You even acknowledge this when you call out personal benefit.
The stated intent is to facilitate creators realizing economic benefits from time spent creating. The reality is that large corporations end up rent seeking using our shared cultural artifacts. Both impacts are economic in nature.
The economic benefit is derived from a psychological effect: the expectation of personal gain.
The economy as a whole benefits from technological progress. The technological progress is fueled by each individual's expectation of personal gain. The personal gain is created via IP law.
There's a psychological component regarding trust. Either that your employer would never try to cheat you or alternatively that your employer is the sort that might try to cheat you but won't thanks to our society's various systems. But the showing up to work itself is a simple exchange of time and skill for money.
They don't. In this case democratizing the IP is more likely a social / economic benefit, not a harm.
We're talking about intellectual property rights, the benefits of which only go to the intellectual property holder.
Although how big a corporation has to be before we cross the line from social / economic harm to social / economic good is an interesting question.
If you are an employee, you get paid for building something (work), and the employer owns the thing that was built (work product). If you are self-employed, it's the other way around. You don't get paid for the work, but you own the work product. Employees generally don't work for free, and the self-employed generally don't give away their capital for free.
If you opt to "release it to the [world] in the spirit of openness and sharing," then you built capital for free and gave it away for free. If you didn't want others to capitalize on the capital, then why did you give it away?
If you want attribution, then either get paid for the work and add it to your resume, or exchange your work product for attribution (e.g., let people visit the Jryio Museum, build a Jryio brand, become known in your community as a creative leader, etc.). If you give it away for free, then your expectations should include the possibility that people will take it for free.
What consideration do you choose to afford to those feelings?