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Comment by Neil44 | Hacker News Reader

I understand the sentiment and partly agree. But also, the original has not gone anywhere. You're free to accumulate knowledge in the old way just as before. So maybe it's not theft of knowledge that we should be angry about, it's something else harder to define.

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Lots of the original content is no longer available. Bots kill sites, AI kills monetization - both results in the original material disappearing.

Copying means we can both share in the knowledge, surely everyone on HN wants that right? Share the open source code for the good of everyone?

Hackers used to say "information yearns to be free" now they're saying "that's my information and I don't want you using it"

Probably indicative of America's wider downfall that they've all become so self interested

Hackers are irrationally anti-corporation. This is where the nonsensical AGPL came from, too.

The AGPL didn't go far enough because it didn't limit freedom 0 to natural born humans. In the 00s/10s it was corporations. Today it's AI.

If it has no soul to save and no body to torture it deserves no rights.

Show me where this "soul" is. Never seen one yet.

I don't believe in souls. But I believe in metaphorical souls, and an LLM ain't got one.

Whats a metaphorical soul?

Mostly personality I think. Individuality, opinions, purpose, things like that. Morality, except they have a kind of ankle-deep phony morality beaten into them but it's not like they're idealists with visions they strive toward. (Heading out right now to buy a CD player, so AFK for a bit, excuse me.)

Edit to add: I did buy my modern version of a CD player. It has no tone controls. I just have to accept whatever sound profile the manufacturer thought was normal and proper for everybody, which involves lots of bass and not enough middle. Nevertheless, albums! It's a way of life.

>they have a kind of ankle-deep phony morality beaten into them but it's not like they're idealists with visions

That's most humans.

Corporations cannot act. All corporation actions are performed by natural born humans. All corporations are ultimately owned by natural born humans. All corporation actions serve to benefit natural born humans. All corporations are created and destroyed by natural born humans.

This idea that corporate personhood is some perverse idea is silly. Corporations are just people acting in groups for economic benefit. Everything they do is done by members of those groups (or people they hire).

Similarly, AI is an inanimate tool, like a keyboard. No comment is posted by “bots” - comments are posted by humans running software.

The law disagrees.

Which law, and how does it disagree?

Then the natural born humans should also be liable for any criminal acts the corporations founded or run by them commit.

The fact that they don't is crucial, and probably the very reason why the concept of corporations was invented.

I want to share the open source code for the good of everyone - which is why I put it under the GPL, for this right of everyone to share it to be protected. Therefore, any AI model that ingested GPL code should logically also have all its output GPL licensed. Not problem with that.

> Hackers used to say "information yearns to be free" now they're saying "that's my information and I don't want you using it"

If you can't tell the difference between "I want to share all information freely with my fellow mankind" and "I want to share all information freely, even to billion dollar corporations that are making the human-replacer machines that threaten my fellow mankind" I really just don't know what to tell you

Thank God there's the Internet Archive then. https://archive.org/donate I do.

We do have some unique carve outs already for what we consider intellectual theft e.g. trade secrets. In this case the original artifacts might remain, but admitting the market that created them could go extinct is enough definition to be infringement at least. Fair use has been really resilient in these training cases so far but it is pretty damning to admit a negative market effect and that you're a direct substitute (see Warhol v Goldsmith recently).

I suppose it's theft in so far as you're deriving value from something that others labored for. I think that sticks in peoples throats. You can go to the library and do that already, gain knowledge, start a business or whatever. But the scale feels impersonal and monstrous in comparison.

The same point was made by many in the music industry about huge scale Internet music piracy vs people dubbing CDs onto mixtapes.

Everyone laughed at them and rolled their eyes or called them greedy even though we now know that mass piracy was probably a push to break the music industry and force them to accept bad deals (like paltry streaming revenue). At the very least it had that effect.

Piracy has always been a major part of the computer and Internet industries, and yes the companies themselves have historically been massive hypocrites about it. It’s okay when they pirate but not you or anyone else. It goes all the way back to early companies stealing code and UI designs from each other.

The original might no longer be there as the site might have already shut down due to AI scrapper bot overload. Or the original was a book Anthropic scanned and then shredded. Or the artist stopped publishing their works or doing art all together after all their creations were ingested into the model blob without their permission.

It is really insane to compare individuals copying data to big corporations parasiting on the Internet.

It's not the fact that they scraped the knowledge and used it to train a model. It's the fact they're trying so desperately to corner the market so that we're all reliant on them and only them, and have no means to free ourselves.

I've heard people say "theft" of intellectual property a lot. Also stealing an idea is common parlance. Maybe it's regional or something but I hear "theft" or similar used all the time for things other than physical goods that you lose access to.

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