Comment by techpression
1 day ago
I find it very easy to understand, people don’t generally want to work for free to support billionaires, and they have few venues to act on that, this is one of them.
There are no ”commons” in this scenario, there are a few frontier labs owning everything (taking it without attribution) and they have the capability to take it away, or increase prices to a point where it becomes a tool for the rich.
Nobody is doing this for the good of anything, it’s a money grab.
Were these contributions not a radical act against zero-sum games in the first place? And now you're gonna let the zero-sum people win by restricting your own outputs to similarly zero-sum endeavors?
I don't wanna look a gift horse in the mouth here. I'm happy to have benefited from whatever contributions were originally forthcoming and I wouldn't begrudge anybody for no longer going above and beyond and instead reverting to normal behavior.
I just don't get it, it's like you're opposed to people building walls, but you see a particularly large wall which makes you mad, so your response is to go build a wall yourself.
It's not about building a wall. It's about ensuring that the terms of the license chosen by the author are respected.
This is why I think permissive licenses are a mistake for most projects. Unlike copyleft licenses, they allow users to take away the freedoms they enjoy from users of derivative works. It's no surprise that dishonest actors take advantage of this for their own gain. This is the paradox of tolerance.
"AI" companies take this a step further, and completely disregard the original license. Whereas copyleft would somewhat be a deterrent for potential abusers, it's not for this new wave of companies. They can hide behind the already loosely defined legal frameworks, and claim that the data is derivative enough, or impossible to trace back, or what have you. It's dishonest at best, and corrupts the last remnants of public good will we still enjoy on the internet.
We need new legal frameworks for this technology, but since that is a glacial process, companies can get rich in the meantime. Especially shovel salespeople.