TL;DR: The big tech AI company LLMs have gobbled up all of our data, but the damage they have done to open source and free culture communities are particularly insidious. By taking advantage of those who share freely, they destroy the bargain that made free software spread like wildfire.
AI’s Unpaid Debt: How LLM Scrapers Destroy the Social Contract of Open Source
Submitted 14 hours ago by yoasif@fedia.io to technology@lemmy.world
https://fedia.io/media/5f/45/5f45d3850120ee642bdc9d8ece5cfb6c5dd50d89e20c9db5fe1458f833ac3fd8.png
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 7 hours ago
There are upsides.
Software freedom is usually associated with FOSS (legal and public exchange), but there’s also scene (underground exchange based on personal connections).
The latter, of course, is not quite the heaven many people have learned to believe in, with everything being a public verified project with all the source code visible and legal to use for every purpose.
But the latter also has advantages, it’s a non-neutered culture with all the old anarchist and hacker substrate.
Any heaven offered is usually a trap anyway.
I wonder if the whole purpose of promotion of FOSS by big companies was, long-term, this. Finding some way to abuse openness and collect for free the resource that becomes digital oil in the next stage, but only for those who own the foundries - computing resources for ML, that is.
gringoaleatorio@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I don’t see the point of romanticizing the scene as preserving some “pure” hacker ethos and conflating it with FOSS.
I’d rather use some free and open source software I can audit and trust rather than some pirated shit some company built.
FOSS creates sustainable value. Companies can build businesses around FOSS through services, support, hosting, and custom development. The scene creates nothing, they don’t promote standards, don’t think of interoperability and so on.
The internet and the very service you’re using run on open source software. The people that build them have values and I don’t think at any point they thought of creating something for LLMs to train on - that’s like the dumbest conspiracy theory I’ve read since a long time and it doesn’t even make sense timeline-wise.
The original FOSS licenses were designed to restrict corporate exploitation, not enable it (even if you have some more permissive licenses that make more sense to be used in a enterprise context), but it was promoted because it worked better and created value.
Would you say the same thing to an artist that freely shared his art and see his work copied in the output of some generative ai tool? That would be victim-blaming
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 hours ago
No, but a bit more culturally mature in the sense of diversity of philosophy.
So, if you just change the mood in these few sentences, you’ll get what I’m trying to say.
You don’t think? I might have encountered some people you’d expect to be good. They are really not that. Let’s not conflate having values with having made contributions.
Designed to do that at the expense of being constrained by law and public morality.
Life is complex.
yoasif@fedia.io 6 hours ago
Even if it wasn't, it seems that they are perfectly fine with it now.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
I mean Apple and Microsoft essentially built their empires on the backs of Open Source developers who believed in a free internet. The took openly available code, altered it and put a price tag on it. Software development and by extend the internet was stolen from the public by the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 5 hours ago
I think it was, almost since mid-nineties. It’s very notable how the whole initial visibility of FOSS came from universities and companies. Before that FOSS projects were not particularly visible compared to the scene in its various forms. (I was born in 1996, so talking about what I didn’t see.)
GNU, for comparison, was considered that strange group of hackers somewhere out there.
I think it’s when in popular culture hackers became some sort of anarchist heroes, - from movies to Star Wars EU etc, - then that culture also became something that had to be dealt with. Doesn’t even matter if it really had such potential.
The threat was that personal computing and the scene combined are similar to the printing press, but multi-dimensional, - software, music, other art, exchange of it, - and the solution was to find the least potent branch. The branch that only aimed for exchange of gifts, public and legal and with no ideology attached (except for quasi-leftist activism somewhere around, but not too thick). And the branch that had the least amount of decentralization, obscurity and invisibility.
As a vaccine.