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Do you have any other obvious facts you'd like to pretend are somehow relevant?
Your response makes sense when we are pulling random marbles from a bag, like old school forums, but social media abandoned that style of commentary long ago.
There are so many variables that go into upvoting and downvoting, and we can't even see the actual scores on HN posts.
The data you refer to isn't available, AFAIK, and even if it were we'd have to account for the hundreds of confounding variables that contribute to post scores being what they are.
The usual human reading information on the internet does nothing with it. They don't adapt the style, they don't translate, they don't reblog a modified version. The ones that do have been criticized for stealing blog posts already before AI.
Yes, HN often has cliques wth opposing views, but I don't even think that's necessary to recall in order to see a problem with corporations who, in order to make their product, commit copyright infringement of billions of works.
These opinions are entirely my own personal views. I do not support tortuous infringement.
The crowd: "Knowledge should be free! Culture belongs to all of us! Information must be democratized!"
AI companies *proceed to copy literally everything and put it through virtual blender, until an universal general-purpose problem-solver tool comes out, then give it out for free or serve for peanuts to literally everyone on the planet with Internet connection *
Crowd: bbb..buuut not like that!
but its not, the old IP model is still intact, except these guys get an exception. and they get to scream bloody murder about distillation. they get to use their massive funding to try to draw a moat around that knowledge and expression with the goal of rent seeking from this point onwards. I'm not supposed to be able to access the original works anymore, but instead the proprietary, newly biased, blender output that contains a little bit of it.
also not at fan of what its doing to the creative process, but you're right here. that's on us for being so easily seduced and not being able to limit ai usage to solving rote problems instead of creative ones.
I swear most people dissing AI with such arguments must perpetually live in a moment and have zero concept of passage of time.
"heart-string-pulling "life's work got appropriated" argument"
I think the water is very muddy in regards to this topic and comments like yours really highlight the distain some people have for others that have talking points about with things they create being thrown into a gargantuan 'blender' as you called it.
Before LLMs, "knowledge should be free" was a call to preserve an open playing field where everyone has the ability to access the intellectual labor of humanity so they can contribute, instead of letting a few institutions wall it off for a profit.
As knowledge is walled off behind these models, rent seeking will expand, "safety guardrails" will become more onerous, and the masses will lose their access. There are wonderful parallels between this and enclosure in Britain.
I cannot repeat enough that that is not true, or even remotely close to true.
When ChatGPT helps me fix my toilet, saving me a $300 plumber call, I don't cut OAI a check for $300 instead.
It is unbelievably easy to harvest more than $20 of value from all the basic plans. Right now, users are overwhelmingly capturing all the value. Even if they triple the price, it's trivial for most workers to easily justify it.
We can project any future scenario we want, but right now the labs are only capturing a tiny fraction of the value they are creating. Especially for the crowd here on HN.
I think consolidation and centralized control are coming fast. Already some models are "too dangerous" to let everyone use, competition from open-weight models are being targeted as "lacking safety," distillation is under attack as "cheating," opting out of data sharing is now an enterprise-only feature, etc.
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[0] - Obviously, utilitarian argument should not be restricted to nonsense strawmen that are narrow-scoped and ignore the temporal dimension.
I mean, actual plan is to "make humans obsolete", "make everyone unemployable" and create weird techno fascist utopia from Thiel money. I personally don't find those sci-fi parts likely to happen. But these people do actually mean them, so.
It is just a few months ago when they were dancing victory dance about how they destroyed all the film makers and artists (practically they did not), as if that was something praise worthy or aspirational.
AI steals by lacking the ability to properly do either attribution and citation, whether this is accidental or by design.
Downloading an existing PhD thesis without permission is very much different from submitting an existing PhD thesis as yours.
Yeah sure, it's on the open Internet, but then again, the capitalists could also actually adhere to the licensing terms of the free software they're hoovering up and all that. These are the same people who want to enforce all kinds of EULAs against the commons, employing measures such as DRM to protect their "intellectual property", so why is it suddenly okay to not comply with IP when it's them doing the infringement?
And that's just with software, but this also affects other creative endeavours. Also the individual HN user's 132 TB Plex server doesn't suck up ludicrous amounts of resources from the commons.