Hacker News Reader

Comment by irdc | Hacker News Reader

Here is what the purveyors of AI don't seem to realise. You can bend copyright law all you want in order to train your models on whatever you can grab, but in the absence of genuine protection of their creative work authors are simply not going to be publishing at all.

View on HN

I think they see it all too well. They still think they can make bank today while it lasts, whatever comes after is some other shareholder's problem. And if we're talking about open source, killing it might be a positive side effect, they'll be ready to sell you a closed source alternative when you no longer have options.

Furthermore, if people not only stop publishing, but also take down already published works, it will create a moat around already existing Language Models

And the more they DDOS small websites — instead of respectfully scraping once — the more realistic my conspiracy theory looks.

I don't think we're going back to closed source. I think we're going back to guilds. Aka. closed knowledge.

People who are making stuff because they want to share it are still going to be publishing. And fighting to be noticed in an unending torrent of slop.

Without any material or immaterial benefits? And with one's work being ground up and turned into weights for the next version of the machine that's threatening one's employment?

I personally am sharing stuff because I want people to read my comics, and maybe join my crowdfunding campaigns.

If I could put everyone pushing all this AI crap into a meat grinder, I would.

> People who are making stuff because they want to share it are still going to be publishing.

Those people who do that are too few and far between to make a difference. The majority of open source devs aren't giving away the source without a license. That license is how they specify what they want in return.

> The majority of open source devs aren't giving away the source without a license.

100% of open source devs aren’t giving away the source without a license, since a licence—the grant of permissions for what is otherwise exclusive to author under the law—is what makes something open source.

> That license is how they specify what they want in return.

No, the license is how they legally give away permission to use material that is legally subjejct to their exclusive rights by virtue of creation. The license may be a contract license that, as you suggest, involves mutual exchange of value, but for many (especially permissive) open source licenses it is a gratuitous bounded grant of permission which has limits but does not involve giving something of value back to the creator.

> No, the license is how they legally give away permission to use material that is legally subjejct to their exclusive rights by virtue of creation. The license may be a contract license that, as you suggest, involves mutual exchange of value, but for many (especially permissive) open source licenses it is a gratuitous bounded grant of permission which has limits but does not involve giving something of value back to the creator.

Wrong. What they want in return is either credit or derivatives of the software. It's disingenuous to suggest that all these authors specifying, in a legal document, the exact mechanism by which to pay them back don't know what they are asking.

If you're not happy with that trade, then don't make it.

Great. More work for AI then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com