Technology

What I've presented here is the absurd concept that AI companies exist after having stolen a wealth of human intellectual property and haven't paid for or attributed any value to the original creators. And now that they have this, they are gatekeeping how it gets used.

But I said it in a punchy one-liner with a sarcastic undertone, and I'm afraid that's where I lost you.

Open source developer here, AI is regularly being used to erase the original developers and artists.

You know what I liked in memes with "stolen" art? There was something to look up to, there was something to become part of our collective culture. Call me a hippie or "irrational" but this is why AI is like the second coming of asbestos, even if it becomes better over time.

Here's my game engine, feel free to fork the shit out of it. Feel free to rewrite it in Rust to "make it better". Feel free to borrow parts of it. My only problem if you do it with AI, so you neither learn during the process of doing it, and you manage to erase me in the process.

The whole reverse engineering craze is being used, so most game devs will be so disillusioned they will leave the industry, and AI vendors can sell expensive subscriptions instead. The AI bros are really angry, that their shiny new technology didn't immediately disrupt the existing creative industry enough.

Your reverse engineering argument might have a point but plagiarism regarding AI should be more obvious. Indeed AI is trained on the collective publicly available knowledge humans have deposited on the internet and then sold back to the same people for a fee without any acknowledgement let alone sharing of profits in someway. It is similar to the kind of unethical behaviour where some academic publishers are employing aggressive marketing strategies to sell public science back to public at high costs. Ofcourse there is still the argument that these AI companies are only charging for operational costs, which may be true for some. But I am willing to bet money that if LLMs becomes an integral part of the modern world then they will turn down this tap to a bare trickle at exorbitant prices. Sam Altman himself confessed as much (he said something along the lines of envisioning a future where AI becomes an on demand information and skill tap, you fill in the rest). Operating something at a loss is a known capitalistic strategy to get people used to your product and drive smaller competition out of market so in a decade or so you become the monopolistic owner of an essential service.

Well tell me where AI companies are giving credit