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Comment by lmz | Hacker News Reader

"It's not illegal" is only an argument against lawsuits / law enforcement involvement. Those PoW anti-AI things people put on pages aren't illegal either.

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No. From my interactions, I have understood that some people use the same argument to wash their consciences from any guilt. What they do is unethical, but not illegal, and they hide under the same argument to drown the ethical angle.

In other words, being honest to oneself is important.

Anti-scraping measures people utilize are neither unethical nor illegal. That’s the difference.

I’m still frequently shocked by the entitlement people feel to other people’s work/ideas/data/bandwidth/server load, to feed a multi-trillion dollar industry. I find the totally cynical “well when you’re making an omelet…” types to be a bit pathetic, but I understand their motivation— they’re simply greedy. But I just can’t understand the genuine indignation about people attempting to limit or stop ingestion of their own work, even if it’s just for the bandwidth costs. Go ingest your own shit.

I often wonder what those people are like IRL. I'd surmise they're the people that are easy to hate. Greedy and intolerable yet want to be the focus.

It's good to agree that some don't have a conscience, and maintaining an appearance matters more. And appearances change based on what's legal or not.

They could detect the other AI labs and also silently burn the tokens at a faster rate providing fewer tokens for money, which does sound illegal to me.

The comments only further prove that without more regulation around this, big AI wouldn't have a "don't be evil" attitude going forward.

Anyone who called for regulations/guardrails of any kind were shouted down as Luddites who hate progress. We all knew this was going to be a mess but $$$ so screw it right?

Maybe that's how OpenAI was able to blow $5.73 BILLION dollars on "marketing" i.e. paying politicians and influencers.

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