> They basically took a public good ... and then they sell it
I think what they sell is more fairly characterized as "hosted inference to a big pretrained model" with perhaps also some optimism that their stuff will improve in the background. The only substantial moat these companies have is their ability to pay for the compute to train contemporary generative models. The public good remains a public good for all to profit from, small-scale or large.
> Someone has to pay ... but nobody asked them if an AI can come along, harvest it all and regurgitate it without a hint of reference to the original source.
Practically speaking, we don't actually need to centralize content to pay for hosting it. People just do it because it makes money. The price of time required to create some work distributed among viewers feels like a vague philosophical argument to me, especially when those works are merely being dispassionately observed by math objects. Currently the price appears to be "whatever I feel morally obliged to and/or can get away with".
> It's a perfect theft
...if it is legally theft to begin with, and not simply fair use. To me the current methods of training e.g. LLMs feel inherently transformative, like a massive partial hash of the internet that you can query. Even if it is ruled as theft in the future, large AI companies will only be further advantaged as they're presently buying off the people that will actually be able to sue them.
I think what they sell is more fairly characterized as "hosted inference to a big pretrained model" with perhaps also some optimism that their stuff will improve in the background. The only substantial moat these companies have is their ability to pay for the compute to train contemporary generative models. The public good remains a public good for all to profit from, small-scale or large.
> Someone has to pay ... but nobody asked them if an AI can come along, harvest it all and regurgitate it without a hint of reference to the original source.
Practically speaking, we don't actually need to centralize content to pay for hosting it. People just do it because it makes money. The price of time required to create some work distributed among viewers feels like a vague philosophical argument to me, especially when those works are merely being dispassionately observed by math objects. Currently the price appears to be "whatever I feel morally obliged to and/or can get away with".
> It's a perfect theft
...if it is legally theft to begin with, and not simply fair use. To me the current methods of training e.g. LLMs feel inherently transformative, like a massive partial hash of the internet that you can query. Even if it is ruled as theft in the future, large AI companies will only be further advantaged as they're presently buying off the people that will actually be able to sue them.