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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

This attitude makes zero sense to me. You benefit from the "training data" just like everyone else does. If you don't, that's a problem with you, not a problem with AI models.

AI solves exactly the meta-problem you describe: "I had a problem and needed to write a one-off doo-dad utility program to solve it." Now you can do something with your time besides writing pointless one-off doo-dads.

As for monetizing the training data, (a) it cost hundreds of millions of dollars to generate the weights, so why begrudge the companies that made the investment and did the research necessary to make it happen?; and (b) rest assured, whatever your doo-dad does, an open-weight model like GLM 5.2 can generate it for free using your own hardware.

So you don't have to pay anyone in that case. Well, except nVidia, I guess. Point granted there.

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It does make sense. When podgietaru wrote their doo-dad programs, I guess they made their work available for humans to use and they didn't mind giving their work away for free. Some other person might say "I'm giving my work away free, I don't care if humans use it or AI, for any purpose". Both are legitimate choices, each according to their own.

As for "everyone benefiting from training data" - sure, but the AI companies are not investing Billions of dollars out of the goodness of their hearts, it is towards one and only singular goal of making profits (at some point). People might be sympathetic to these AI companies if they at least behave decently - they take everyone's work (text, software, fiction, music, images, videos...) without paying a penny to anyone. If they take everyone's work for free, they should give away anything that is built on that work also for free. This is before we even get to environment, privacy, hammering sites by not respecting robots.txt etc issues.

If I stole all veggies from your garden but spent time/money/effort making a meal, I should at minimum share it with you for free, no? Even if I spent my own money making the meal, it was made from stolen raw material...

If I stole all veggies from your garden but spent time/money/effort making a meal, I should at minimum share it with you for free, no?

Yes, and that's exactly my point. We are in violent agreement. It's shared with me, with you, with OP, and with everybody else. We can get a delicious meal for free or we can pay somebody else to serve us a slightly-tastier version.

Here, disregarding copyright law has fulfilled the very purpose of copyright law: to advance the useful arts and sciences. Copyright law was the best tool we had to accomplish that before, and now we have something better.

But the AI companies are not publishing the models? Moreover they are charging for access to the models.

Sure they are. Surf around on HuggingFace and you'll see dozens of open-weight models up to 120B parameters in size from for-profit US companies, freely downloadable (if not freely runnable, alas). Probably hundreds of them, at this point.

And a 3T parameter model is scheduled to be dropped by the Chinese on Monday.

They should certainly publish more, and if somebody were to argue that model weights trained by scraping copyrighted data should inherently be accessible to everyone, I'd be 100% in favor of that.

I wouldn’t be happy if those companies used my vegetables to open a Michelin star restaurant, even if I got a free McDouble out of the deal.

Plant based I guess I don’t know metaphors are hard.

But the McDouble isn't an adequate comparison. Yes, the companies who opened Michelin-rated restaurants with the food they stole from your garden are giving you McDonalds'-level food for free and charging for the rest. Meanwhile, some other companies who raided your garden are giving you the plant-based equivalent of Ruth's Chris or Fogo de Chão for free.

The other thing is, after they stole all that stuff from your garden, it was somehow still there. Your neighbors on Hacker News say that some bandits raided your garden, but you can plainly see that no one has picked any fruit or uprooted any plants, and your security cameras reveal nothing more rapacious than a rabbit or two. You begin to suspect that your neighbors are gaslighting you.

The plant metaphor breaks down when you pause, take a breath, put the McDouble down and realize that intellectual property is a completely different ownership concept than physical property.

Exactly. Plants, like flames, reproduce themselves.

Technically most flowering plants need an intermediary for pollination

The best kind of correct!

>As for "everyone benefiting from training data" - sure, but the AI companies are not investing Billions of dollars out of the goodness of their hearts, it is towards one and only singular goal of making profits (at some point).

Its not guaranteed they will ever get there, every day it seems increasingly likely that without massive government intervention we are just waiting for local open weights models to become popular.

Meanwhile my ISP gatekeeps the same free content behind a service payment. Their motive isnt free love and world peace, its also profit.

>If I stole all veggies from your garden but spent time/money/effort making a meal, I should at minimum share it with you for free, no?

If you cloned all the veggies in my garden you are free to clone them further and fill your belly you owe me nothing.

I don't know how else to explain it. It doesn't feel the same to have my contributions smushed into a linear-algebra machine? For me, the incentive was the idea that my contributions might have directly helped someone. That absolutely does not feel the same when I think "My answer has modified the back propagation of a Machine Learning training run."

It doesn't have to make sense to you - I just believe that I'm not exactly alone in this thought.

Now apply this to Art, free stories, writing etc. It feels bad to have your free contributions hoovered up and monetized. It doesn't feel particularly fair or ethical to me. And it'd make me double think before making something free and publicly available.

Understood, there's certainly nothing invalid about your point of view here. It's just not one that I personally can come to terms with.

I've spent a lot of time in your shoes, wasting time on busy-work needed to accomplish a larger goal (and absolutely sharing the results freely, over multiple decades)... and I don't miss that part of it one bit.

> Now you can do something with your time besides writing pointless one-off doo-dads

Writing software one-offs to scratch an itch was historically one of my most enjoyable past-times. AI trivializing that has been a very real theft of joy in my life.

Solving the actual problem was never the point, it was just motivation to do geek-out and craft some code.

AI is rapidly diminishing many interesting hobbies (coding, art, music, writing).

Having more free time when there's nothing fun nor exciting to do with it isn't really a benefit.

This is such a sad worldview. Life without any challenges. Every problem immediately solved without learning anything.

What's sad is somebody giving you a godlike tool and watching you mope around muttering about "life without any challenges."

The godlike tools are paid subscriptions at best and restricted to a handful of corpos by the government at best. The free scraps thrown to the proles are mostly novelty. The other day I asked 5.6 Sol to identify a push prop airplane and it said “this is a helicopter.”

It's only considered "godlike" by those satisfied with mediocrity

The person I replied to is apparently very content with mediocrity.

> it cost hundreds of millions of dollars to generate the weights

It cost hundreds of billions of dollars to generate the training data, they just didn't get paid.

>Now you can do something with your time besides writing pointless one-off doo-dads.

This is such a disgusting statement that goes against the very core of what open-source stands for. If even only one person got some use out of what they made, it is not pointless by definition.

| Now you can do something with your time besides writing pointless one-off doo-dads.

...thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators.

...thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators

That also makes no sense, but I don't know what else I should have expected.

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