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.
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 do not want billion dollar tech empires to steal from regular people and profit off of those stolen works” is the position of an “intellectual property warrior” to you?
You see no difference between that and a roomful of Disney lawyers sending a cease-and-desist to a 9 year old who runs a fan website?