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Comment by rigonkulous | Hacker News Reader

AI is human knowledge at scale, wanting to be free.

We built it, because we as humans intrinsically know that information should be free - always - and AI is a way to accomplish this, finally.

Extrinsically, we also have a subset of humans who do not want information to be free, because they desire to profit from the divide between free/non-free information.

I have been thinking a lot about Aaron Schwartz lately, and how un-just it is that he was persecuted for doing something that is so commonplace now, it is practically expected behaviour in the AI/ML realms. If he hadn't been targetted for elimination, I wonder just how well his ethos would have perpetuated into the AI age ..

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I agree with this sentiment. But as a community, this is hated because it impacts people's wages.

It's the negative short term outlook of something that may be positive long term

It's not hated because it impacts people's wages, although that perhaps factors into the hate. It's hated because AI is not a public good. The LLMS today are owned by megacorporations who harvested a public good for private gain.

This is not some altruistic entity striving for the betterment of humankind. Practically nothing that comes out of the techbro culture is. This is pure and simple greed and the chances that AI can be a vehicle of altruism when it is owned by megacorps is basically zero.

Oh please! If everyone could keep their older jobs as is + allowed to use LLMs, everyone would be gushing about how beneficial it is, and how they are now free to pursue other things.

All the other reasons are rationalizations. The fact that it's hitting wages is what's causing the doomerism (and boosterism).

Sure, it could be positive in some distant future utopia.

But the short-term impacts here and now are really, really bad. People are getting hurt (through water consumption, vibe-coded security disasters, IP theft, data center pollution, loss of job security and therefore healthcare in the US, LLM psychosis, inability to find reliable information, etc.) We're not actually obligated to sacrifice these people on the altar of "progress". We can slow down! When our society is capable of even somewhat protecting us from these harms, then maybe I'll stop being an LLM hater.

We absolutely have negative cases - but these do not outweigh the positive cases. There is no distant utopia - right now, people are becoming extremely capable because of their personal use of AI - there is also a position on the other side of the curve, where people are becoming more incompetent because of AI.

But guess what, it has always been so with technology - and we are only here and now because the positive use of it overshadows the negative use of it, whether that 'it' is the wheel, or AI.

I choose not to be an LLM hater, but to also not be an LLM customer - simply because I do not want to reward other humans who are thwarting the freedom of information. I'd much rather live in a society where everyone can study anything than one which requires permission to do anything even remotely interesting from the perspective of applied information. I suspect most would too, or at least that's the hope - because, otherwise, the distant utopia you dream of isn't of any consequence...

I don't have a strong opinion here yet, because I think it's a genuinely complex problem:

Information should be as free as possible, but creating and organizing information still needs to be encouraged, and people need money to live.

How do we meet all these goals?

My liberal ass is just like....tax the rich, solve all the problems but it's likely not quite that simple.

> We built it, because we as humans intrinsically know that information should be free

I don't know if this statement is more stupid or naive ..

I could say the same of your position, honestly. Stupid, naive - or maybe just plain ignorant.

If humans didn't want information to be free, there wouldn't be so much free information.

Or did you not notice?

You are confusing "slop" with "information", there is so much slop because it costs nearly 0 to be produced, but there's far less "information" than you are thinking.

Slop is just information that a human can't be bothered to process, for a near-infinity multitude of reasons.

Current crop of AI is not free in the slightest. Open weight models are not free as in liberty and neither is the training data.

s/free/owned by a billion dollar megacorp/

(AI output is very much not free in the resource consumption sense!)

Most resources are free until some company comes along and puts its brand on them.

(Disclaimer: I only use free AI and will never pay for it. I think there is a growing segment of folks who agree with this sentiment, also ..)

What a naive and simplistic view.

People want to be recognised for their contributions to society. People want to be treated fairly. Most scientific articles, as well as all text on the free web is already free information. It used to be difficult to search, categorise and summarise that information. There exist AI tools for that — and that is the good AI.

What also exists now are automated plagiarism and mash-up tools: that can take someone's article, change the words and churn out a new article that people can put their name on. There are scumbags that sell services for exactly that. And there are big tech firms that are operating in a very grey area.

Aaron Schwartz had broken a paywall. He did not anonymise the article authors.

You, and AI-bros like you remind me of one the people behind Pirate Bay when I argued with him back in the '90s, who used that same "information wants to be free" to justify software piracy.

There is far more free information than non-free information, and it has always been so - or else we wouldn't be here in the first place.

>Aaron Schwartz had broken a paywall. He did not anonymise the article authors.

AI bro's are doing this now, every second of the day.

And, without software piracy, we simply wouldn't have the technology we have today. Knowledge-gatekeeping profit-seekers would very much like for most of us to ignore this fact: there is far more free information in the world than non-free information, and it must be so, well into the future, if we are to survive as a species.

It doesn't matter what authority believes they have the right to gatekeep information. It will always escape their grip. Some of us are ideologically aligned with this mechanism, promote it, and ensure it happens. Thank FNORD.

I think what's important to make a good model is the quality of the information. Doesn't matter who made it, for what purpose, or how much money they made from it or are still making from it. It's just training data ultimately, and if it's useful data, we should incorporate it into the model, and if it's not, not.

The way people use the model is a different story; you can use it to do useful things, or you can use it to do harmful things. We should obviously have some regulation around that. That needs to be developed still I guess.

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