In addition, a great number of people have decided to stop publishing their code publicly, and discuss techniques except in spaces they can be sure it's a one-on-one with a human being.
Some things already got lost.
1) Lazy peers, and
2) Spiteful peers with "dog in the manger" mentality.
The latter case personally irks me, mostly because this often involves personal benefit (economical or moral) due to them claiming to give away knowledge for altruistic reasons, which later behavior reveals was a lie, mislabeling proprietary as open and free, to reap unfair gains.
But that's all off-topic for this thread anyway.
Last night my daughter told me her friend (a boy) signed up to take the last spot of a baking class at camp just to spite his sister, who wanted it.
Turns out he liked baking!
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I think this whole discussion shows that there's a lot of Calvinball going on with IP, where the creator keeps trying to change the rules as a way to defend their power and social order.
Some of the major OSS licenses require attribution when someone copies the work in question, AI companies fail to do so. People getting annoyed when others break the social contract has nothing to do with any other motives they can always benefit the world by doing something else.
You may prefer someone continue maintaining infrastructure you use but they could be just as happy delivering food to the elderly. The desire for people to continue helping you is little more than entitlement here.
Much of it might be because their license (MIT, BSD etc) was ignored completely.
I can only speak for myself, but right now working on open-source is even more thankless and shitty. Now any douche-knuckle comes to your repo and starts spamming you with bad PRs or issues as if their favourite LLM du jour has some fantastical insight they have to share with you, when it has already been explained ad nauseam that what they want is out of scope, or isn’t technically possible, or has tradeoffs XYZ.
You had lazy people before, sure, but those interactions were less frequent, shorter, and for each person I used to craft a careful response that would explain everything in detail and teach those I interacted with. But why would I waste my time crafting a reply that the person on the other side is just going to shove into their LLM and learn nothing?
Regarding open-source, LLMs make people more disrespectful of the people doing the work. And if you’re sharing your expertise for free to be disrespected, why bother?
They object to the systematized devaluing of their work. They object to becoming a class of invisible laborers (who only become visible when there is need to blame someone).
There's people saying they'd rather talk to an LLM than to me.
I dunno how else to say it to you, but when somebody happily announces that they'd rather talk to a computer than to you, and they are happy this is the future.
That carries certain connotations beyond "external validation".
The person in the top of this thread was claiming "nobody has been robbed".
There's people in these communities that I will never have an intelligent conversation with, again.
I'm not talking about being able to pay bills or anything, I'm just talking about being replaced by a computer program, in a social sense.
And the people make the culture. So, in effect, the culture suffered. I think you’re taking the original comment too literally with your “piracy is theft” comparison. Obviously you can’t literally rob culture¹, because culture is a concept. But you can lose something from it, and that loss can have a cause you can point to, so in a way elements of it can be “robbed”.
That’s what I get from the original comment when I steelman it, anyway.
¹ Sounds like the name of a Rob Zombie associate.
The world is bigger than your weird, entitled view.
You basically just told everyone that the existence of the demoscene "irks" you. And you consider this being "irked" somehow more relevant than these actual communities being torn apart by the existence of LLMs.
Oh no you called it "unfair gains", unfair according to those rules??
A lot of my peers who have been in tech for more than a decade are all doing this. They're effectively backing out of the industry. Their attitude now is they're ready for retirement in their 40's. They're only building and working on side projects and only sharing with people they know, nobody else.
One thing I'm seeing right now is the amount of institutional and domain knowledge being lost is a on a massive scale. The more startling fact is nobody seems to care - as if vibe coding and LLM's are going to fill this gap.
But then again, I haven't devoted my life to developing and releasing a huge open source project used by millions, so perhaps my opinion should be discounted accordingly.
The reaction to LLMs pretty clearly revealed who was giving things away, and who was indirectly selling them and using "giving away" for unfair advantage.
BTW, you mentioned "pay it forward" -- please explain me how an LLM user no longer interacting with other humans, is going to "pay it forward".
I dunno what "irks" you, what's your problem, who mistreated you so badly that you have to be so condescending and attributing malice to people whose motivations you have absolutely no clue about.
Stopped publishing anything and stopped creating anything.
But in all fairness this started long ago. I remember a conversation where I asked someone who read a niche blog every day why he never posted a comment. (the blog had zero comments) If you like what they wrote and have thoughts about it, why not "honor" them with a few words? How is that to much to ask? They clearly just never bothered to but in stead made up all kinds of excuses.
Imagine having to explain that you can respond if someone talks to you? If there was a culture surely it ended there?
It's the same as saying "People don't kill people; guns do." Maybe guns(AI) should be regulated, but the primary problem is murderers(lazy peers), not weapons(AI).
I can be a murderer with a knife, sure, but how many people can I kill? How many people can I kill if I have a class three license an a full auto gun?
I can pirate a news article here or there, sure, but how many news articles can I pirate? How many news articles can I pirate with AI?
Not much more than with a bash/curl loop. Which, on one hand, AI can write for you, but on the other hand, AI will make you no longer need to pirate those articles in the first place.
Also it's not end-user piracy being discussed - it's the act of training AI itself that's accused here to be "robbery of our culture".
That does suggest that along with murderers, the easy accessibility of firearms is a problem (assuming that the ratio of murderers in different populations is approximately the same).