Why? If it helps people it should be good. Why bother posting something on the public web if not to help people.
Sure a large org is receiving some ancillary benefit, but do you feel the same hostility for people working at [large corp] using what you worked on to help them at work?
I honestly don't understand the hostility towards llms using public data
This is like asking why someone doesn't want to do free work for Oracle's database offerings. I mean, why not try to make things better?
Well, because a lot of corporations couldn't care less about the public good and are happy to cause harm if it makes them more money. OpenAI doesn't care about your welfare or mine any more than a sleezy ad company or spyware product does.
If OpenAI were actually an open source company working to benefit the broader ecosystem I would agree with you, but that's about as far as possible from the current state.
One of the reasons is that the company can later close up the effort, completely destroying the future potential helping part of it.
But at the end of the day, I understand that altruism doesn't work this way. But this just means that while I have some tendencies, I'm not altruistic after all. I attach a lot of feelings to where my work ends up and how it affects things, which is, for example, why I like "sticky" licenses like the GPL, and tend toward efforts like the Effective Altruism, however ineffective I think they end up being.
>I honestly don't understand the hostility towards llms using public data
So, getting back to the topic, feelings are attached to where the publications end up and how it affects things. Because of the unintended consequence of companies training AI on publicly available data, people harboring these feelings feel like their thing has been taken from them without their consent. And that is a bad feeling, powerless, inability, and one of the ways of coping with that is coping with it on the outside, directing the feeling outward, whereby it becomes active defense, or hostility.
Don't understand or don't agree? Because it's really very simple to understand.
Generally people need some kind of incentive to produce content. This could be just the thought of somebody, an actual human, having consumed your content. Or a like, a comment exchange that further enriches the topic. Perhaps it leads to a new follower or even a new (online) friend. A job opportunity. Even a date. Or maybe just plain ad impressions to make your effort worthwhile.
The picture of content production was already bleak. Google gets to take it all for free and is the traffic controller deciding who gets the crumbs, and even then is also the sole advertiser. But at least they might throw you some traffic, leading to all the interactions I just mentioned.
OpenAI just steals your shit without permission, credit or payment and completely cuts of any direct human interaction with the original content or its maker.
How can you not "understand" the hostility? This is existential not just for the open web, also the closed web. Have you missed the developments at Twitter, StackOverflow, Reddit?
Sure a large org is receiving some ancillary benefit, but do you feel the same hostility for people working at [large corp] using what you worked on to help them at work?
I honestly don't understand the hostility towards llms using public data