Comment by irdc
4 hours ago
Here is what the purveyors of AI don't seem to realise. You can bend copyright law all you want in order to train your models on whatever you can grab, but in the absence of genuine protection of their creative work authors are simply not going to be publishing at all.
I think they see it all too well. They still think they can make bank today while it lasts, whatever comes after is some other shareholder's problem. And if we're talking about open source, killing it might be a positive side effect, they'll be ready to sell you a closed source alternative when you no longer have options.
I don't think we're going back to closed source. I think we're going back to guilds. Aka. closed knowledge.
Furthermore, if people not only stop publishing, but also take down already published works, it will create a moat around already existing Language Models
And the more they DDOS small websites — instead of respectfully scraping once — the more realistic my conspiracy theory looks.
People who are making stuff because they want to share it are still going to be publishing. And fighting to be noticed in an unending torrent of slop.
Without any material or immaterial benefits? And with one's work being ground up and turned into weights for the next version of the machine that's threatening one's employment?
Great. More work for AI then.