Comment by iLoveOncall
5 hours ago
I personally don't care about the morality, I'm just pointing out an absurd double standard.
You cannot claim that AI labs are bad for illegally downloading content to build their AI without paying creators, and that AA is good for illegally offering the same content.
I think both are immoral, but I definitely pirate all the content I can (except video games but only because it's unsafe, not to remunerate creators).
It is not grey at all, this is some bullshit that people tell themselves to feel better. Whether it's using the output of AI models or downloading a book on Anna's Archive, you are ultimately robbing the creator of profits.
Nobody on HackerNews would argue otherwise if their employer stole their code from their mind and didn't pay for it.
I agree that it's not grey at all, but because they're both so obviously good (particularly labs releasing open weight models). It's great that there are organizations making it ~free for anyone in the world to obtain information instantly. On the contrary, our policy of restricting something that naturally can be duplicated an unlimited number of times for free is obviously morally bad. People should be incentivized to create new ideas, not rent old ones for a century.
Of course on a related note, most work that's interesting to me was created by people who are dead anyway, so they don't mind.
Anyway, are you sure most people that support AA don't also support e.g. Deepseek and Qwen's efforts?