Comment by runarberg
7 hours ago
Indeed. This whole LLM has been a planetary scale theft of labor. They stole our labor and are now leasing it back to us as rent-seeking on the means of production.
Those of us who refuse to use that stolen labor are loosing our jobs, fast.
It's not even limited to software engineering.
I'm sure word is getting around of MBAs and etc getting access to GitLab and using AI to make python apps. Look, you don't need devs anymore?
Okay, but wouldn't a software engineer be better at that? "No, because I'm an SME, I know finance!". Right, but the LLM knows finance?
A year ago these tools were assistants, copilots, but know.. It's clear if the pace doesn't plateau or slow greatly we are headed towards replacement of massive swaths of knowledge workers.
And it risks completely destroying our society due to the economic fallout from mass unemployment..
“If you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what [Alan] Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.”
-- Paul Krugman, 1997
Note this does not say "it will decrease if we suddenly invent new productivity technologies".
Jokes on them. You don’t need MBAs any more. You just need the cash or a credit line.
If you mean publishing open source code, they didn’t steal it. We gave it away. Generosity has always been vulnerable to “exploitation,” but some of apparently understood that risk better than others.
My jumping off point was OSS, but I was actually talking about the entirety of human knowledge being used to make a few people insanely rich while sending everyone else who made the LLM training possible to the bread line.
No, I reject this framing. Copyright violations are orthogonal to labor theft. Labor theft can include copyright violation, but it doesn’t have to. My MIT licensed code may not have been violated (it probably was though; where is the copy of the notice that my license requires?) but my labor was for sure stolen.
I am fine with people using my work, copying my source code, and distributing derivative work. I am not fine with AI companies stealing everyone’s work and renting it back to us.
You already valued your own labor at zero by giving it away for free. How is taking something you give away for free suddenly considered "stealing"?
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Stealing labor itself isn’t actually a thing. Your wages could be stolen, except - what wages? Maybe the output from your labor could be stolen, but not if nothing material was lost. If you can’t point to a specific intellectual property violation, you have no case.
Did they steal Wikipedia? Wikipedia is still there.
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