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AI’s Unpaid Debt: How LLM Scrapers Destroy the Social Contract of Open Source (www.quippd.com)

submitted 8 hours ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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.

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[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

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.

[–] yoasif@fedia.io 1 points 37 minutes ago (1 children)

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.

Even if it wasn't, it seems that they are perfectly fine with it now.

[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 16 minutes 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.