Can’t escape AI slop projects from meat proxies man. Every single open source project smells like Claude Code recently. Sad times.
Can’t escape AI slop projects from meat proxies man. Every single open source project smells like Claude Code recently. Sad times.
That is if you believe “intellectual property” to be an ethical concept in the first place. Many in the free software movement do not. Many of us also do not believe copying, sharing, or remixing is “theft.” That is a propaganda term from the copyright cartel.
(Note that I think so-called generative AI has many problems but this is not one that concerns the free software movement imho)
I don’t think copying, sharing or remixing is theft unless it’s done by a big corporation to make money without attribution to my work.
That’s very brave of you. In the meantime other open source developers will continue using AI models that currently exist to benefit their coding were it can.
“open source developers will continue using AI models that currently exist to benefit their coding were it can” does not undo that all mainstream, commercial AI agents are the product of theft of labor from all the programmers, artists, authors, etc of all the media that the models were trained on.
You can say the ends justify the means, but you have to own that commercial AI agents, and the work they produce when wielded by humans, are a profit engine for thieves. At the end of the day, those programmers are using an AI agent that is being sold to them by a corporation that is profiting off of theft. “But the AI tool works well!” isn’t the end of the moral discussion. How did the AI tool get so good at programming?
Copying a FOSS project for personal use and development isn’t unethical. Copying the FOSS project into an AI model and then selling that AI model for profit is. And it’s been done on a scale that’s difficult to fathom and impossible to undo. Persons whose crafts have been irreparably undermined by these models have had their livelihoods impacted and there will be no means of exacting justice from those who have committed to this technology because they are simply too wealthy to hold to account.
If you’re a regular guy and you try to download and disseminate information like Aaron Swartz, suddenly the law has a lot to say about intellectual property theft.
Of course I support Aaron Swartz and his endeavours to make information free. I also don’t see how using open source projects to build an AI model is theft. Intellectual property just shouldn’t be a thing at all.
Building an AI model is not, itself, the issue. Profit is.
You can’t legally take someone else’s work for free and then profit from it without their permission. Especially when the licenses for those works specifically say they are not to be used for profit.
If OpenAI, Google, Meta et al were not charging for their AI models (or profiting from them in any way), I would see no issue with that. But they are profiting immensely by turning their software product into the largest speculative investment in modern history. Even the free tiers of their models are part of this larger business plan. They are betting large swaths of the western economy on it. It is unethical.
I really don’t care about what the law says. What is ethical and what is legal are often complete opposites at this point.
AI companies lose money on there free AI tiers. And we both know there larger business model is not going to work. Being in the moral right by not using corporate software, or telling other people to not use corporate software isn’t actually doing anything. Furthermore many people use Chinese AI models that benefit workers rather than take from them do you have issues with Chinese models?
That’s something that you and the AI companies have in common! Although in their case they simply have enough money that there are no meaningful legal consequences to their unethical actions.
This is wholly irrelevant to our discussion as I’ve not only accused commercial AI of legal misdeeds, but also of unethical practices. They will never be properly held to account for the laws they’ve broken, let alone the (perfectly legal, but completely indefensible) actions taken in pursuit of the larger goal such as cutting down forests to make room for datacenters, evaporating entire lakes to cool them, and straining the power grid to power them.
I’ve addressed this already. The existence of the “free tier” is irrelevant when they are still selling that exact same product (an AI model, but without restrictions/token caps) to the Premium and Enterprise users (billions of dollars in contracts across the tech industry alone). The “free tier” is, to them, a cost of doing business. ChatGPT was the fastest adoption of any app in history for a reason: it was free. That was a business decision with a single, solitary, long-term goal: profit. A Google search is free. Always has been. And yet they managed to turn a “free” web search into one of the most powerful entities on earth (Alphabet, Inc). Because it wasn’t actually free; that was just part of their business model.
And you’ve invested appropriately to take advantage of this fact, right? You’ve purchased puts options for AI companies since you “know” their trillion-dollar gambit will ultimately fail, right? After all, if you play your cards right, you’ll be set for life by successfully betting against them.
I do not recall saying any such thing.
This is a non sequitur. Chinese AI is built on stolen works just like western AI. There is no difference there.
You were just mentioning illegality as a reason not to use AI, I do not think it is a valid reason so I was combating your point.
The difference between openAI and google is that openAI doesn’t generate money from the free tire while google does.
I really don’t understand what you mean here. If your wondering I haven’t invested in AI.
Wait if your main argument isn’t that people should stop using AI then what is your argument?
Chinese models are open weight so anyone can run them, isn’t this kind of contributing back the kind of thing we should hope for with AI? Also, I’m still not sure how training models on open source code is theft. I don’t agree with the idea of intellectual property which is why I also pirate all my media.
Intellectual property warriors wield intellectual property laws like a club, but the club is made of thin air. What AI companies are doing is not illegal according to those laws.
What you want is to change those laws to be more oppressive, but no country will do that. They’re all pro-AI. You’d need a revolution, but I’ve never heard of a “status quo defender revolution”.
(Imagine a status quo revolution: radlibs running around with signs saying “More oppression”, “We hate progress”, “More power to the current ruling class”, “Make not voting blue illegal”)
I’m not a free software developer (or a developer at all), but the idea that gen AI doesn’t concern the free software movement seems odd to me. I think there’s a pretty big space between being a big “intellectual property” proponent or copyright cheerleader and just not wanting to have your work taken without any regard for the conditions you set for sharing it. Someone may be fine with sharing their code for free as long as they get attribution or the derivative shares-alike, for instance. AI ignores the licenses that people release their code under, both copyleft and permissive.
This article mentions some of the concerns that the FSF has regarding gen AI: https://lwn.net/Articles/1040888/
This more recent article indicates that the FSF seems inclined to push for gen AI companies to open up their models: https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/03/16/fsf-urges-ai-vendors-to-liberate-llms/5221192
Edit: PS Consider that if all IP law went away, all open source licenses would be moot. At that point, a lot of people who develop and release their software under open source licenses may stop doing so. Gen AI is already having a chilling effect on all creative endeavors that can be output as a digital output. The elimination of IP laws would make this chilling effect much more severe.
It’s like being a plumber.
The plumber comes over, looks at the problem, says hmm, taps on pipe and charges you $500.
You’re not paying for the hammer or the 30 seconds of work. You’re paying for the 25 years it took them to learn what to do so that it fixes the issue.
The hammer is fungible. The plumber is not. Don’t be the hammer.
If all the IP law was repealed I’d celebrate, but enforcing them on everyone except the worst tech companies is not an improvement.