Comment by alightsoul

10 days ago

Oh my god I have seen this argument here repeated so many times with different rephrasings. I do not want to believe it is a bot or astroturfing.

3 comments

alightsoul

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goldie_wilson  10 days ago

Definitely not a bot. I'm just tired of seeing this community becoming another reddit echo chamber for ideology that is disassociated from reality. The actions here are two completely different cases. You want to talk about whether or not 35 years was appropriate for Aaron's crime, great, that's a valid discussion. If you want to argue whether AI training sets violate fair use, awesome, another completely valid civil law discussion. But thinking that what Aaron did is comparable to Meta scraping is a completely hollow narrative. It relies on total ignorance of what crimes Aaron committed even if he and others believed they were committed for an altruistic reason. Society would collapse if we just ignored crime because the criminal was doing what they thought was a good thing.

Furthermore this whole post is using Aaron as a strawman to further the argument that big corporations = bad. While its true that the very nature of a big corporation is to minmax (gaming term if you are unfamiliar) with the max being profit and min being everything else, they are not inherently evil and the argument is an over simplification of a much larger more complex situation. Anyone who simply believes they inherently bad shouldn't be posting online because all of the hardware and services required to do so demonstrates their complacency in contributing to these large corporations and makes them a hypocrite.