Comment by globie
3 months ago
What's being strip mined is the openness of the Internet, and AI isn't the one closing up shop. Github was created to collaborate on and share source code. The company in the best position to maximize access to free and open software is now just a dragon guarding other people's coins.
The future is a .txt file of John Carmack pointing out how efficient software used to be, locked behind a repeating WAF captcha, forever.
AI isn't the one closing up shop, it’s the one looting all the stores and taking everything that isn’t bolted down. The AI companies are bad actors that are exploiting the openness of the internet in a fashion that was obviously going to lead to this result - the purpose of these scrapers is to grab everything they can and repackage it into a commercial product which doesn’t return anything to the original source. Of course this was going to break the internet, and people have been warning about that from the first moment these jackasses started - what the hell else was the outcome of all this going to be?
This rings the same tune as the MPAA and RIAA utilizing lawfare to destroy freedom online when pirates were the ones "break[ing] the internet."
Could you help me understand what the difference is between your point and the arguments MPAA and RIAA used to ruin the torrent users' lives they concluded were "thieves"?
As a rule of thumb, do you think people who are happy with the services they contribute content to being open access and wish them to remain so should be the ones who are forced to constantly migrate to new services to keep their content free?
When AI can perfectly replicate the browsing behavior of a human being, should Github restrict viewing a git repository to those who have verified blood biometrics or had their eyes scanned by an Orb? If they make that change, will you still place blame on "jackasses"?
The moral argument in favor of piracy was that it didn’t cost the companies anything and the uses were noncommercial. Neither of those applies to the AI scrapers - they’re aggressively overusing freely-provided services (listen to some of the other folks on this thread about how the scrapers behave) and they’re doing so to create a competing commercial products.
I’m not arguing you shouldn’t be annoyed by these changes, I’m arguing you should be mad at the right people. The scrapers violated the implicit contract of the open internet, and now that’s being made more explicit. GitHub’s not actually a charity, but they’ve been able to provide a free service in exchange for the good will and community that comes along with it driving enough business to cover their costs of providing that service. The scrapers have changed that math, as they did with every other site on the internet in a similar fashion. You can’t loot a store and expect them not to upgrade the locks - as the saying goes, the enemy gets a vote on your strategy, too.
3 replies →
> Could you help me understand what the difference is
Well the main difference is that this is being used to justify blocking and not demanding thousands of dollars.
> When AI can perfectly replicate the browsing behavior of a human being
They're still being jackasses because I'm willing to pay to give free service to X humans but not 20X bots pretending to be humans.
Free and open source software is on GitHub, but AI- and other crawlers do not respect the licenses. As someone who writes a lot of code under specific FOSS licenses, I welcome any change that makes it harder for machines to take my code and just steal it