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Comment by gkcnlr | Hacker News Reader

As long as AI (genAI, LLMs, whatever you call it describe the current tech) is perceived not as a "bicycle of the mind" and a tool to utilize 'your' skills to a next phase but as a commodity to be exploited by giant corporations whose existence is based on maximizing profits regardless of virtue or dignity (a basic set of ethics to, for example, not to burn books after you scan it feed your LLM like Anthropic), it is really hard to justify the current state of AI.

Once you understand the sole winner in this hype is the one who'll be brutally scraping every bit of data, whether it's real-time or static and then refining it to give it back to you without your involvement in the process (a.k.a, learning) you'll come to understand that the current AI by nature is hugely unfavorable to mental progression...

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> As long as AI (...) is perceived not as a "bicycle of the mind" and a tool to utilize 'your' skills to a next phase but as a commodity (...), it is really hard to justify the current state of AI.

I don't agree at all. The "commodity" argument is actually a discussion on economic viability. This is the central discussion, and what will determine if tomorrow we will still have higher-quality and up-to-date LLMs available to us.

You need to understand that nowadays there is a clear race to the bottom in LLM-related services, at a time when the vast majority is not economically viable. The whole AI industry is unsustainable at this point. Thus it's rather obvious that making a business case and generating revenue is a central point of discussion.

> not to burn books after you scan it

Shouldn't we blame copyright laws for that?

How would copyright law possibly compel the burning of books?

IANAL, I can only cite court decision: "And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies."

You don't have to burn the book, but then you can't scan it, either.

In some places there's an exception to copyright law for format shifting if you destroy the original. If you don't destroy the original, then you made a copy and that's not allowed.

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