zlacker

>>tablet+(OP)
> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.

This kind of guilt-by-association play might be the most common fallacy in internet discourse. None of us are allowed to express outrage at the bulk export of GitHub repos with zero regard for their copyleft status because some members of the software engineering community are large-scale pirates? How is that a reasonable argument to make?

The most obvious problem with this is it's a faulty generalization. Many of us aren't building large-scale piracy sites of any sort. Many of us aren't bulk downloading media of any kind. The author has no clue whether the individual humans making the IP argument against AI are engaged in piracy, so this is an extremely weak way to reject that line of argument.

The second huge problem with this argument is that it assumes that support for IP rights is a blanket yes/no question, which it's obviously not. I can believe fervently that SciHub is a public good and Elsevier is evil and at the same time believe that copyleft licenses placed by a collective of developers on their work should be respected and GitHub was evil to steal their code. Indeed, these two ideas will probably occur together more often than not because they're both founded in the idea that IP law should be used to protect individuals from corporations rather than the other way around.

The author has some valid points, but dismissing this entire class of arguments so flippantly is intellectually lazy.

>>lolind+qq
I’m a free software developer and have been for over 25 years. I’ve worked at many of the usual places too and I enjoy and appreciate the different licenses used for software.

I’m also a filmmaker and married to a visual artist.

I don’t touch this stuff at all. It’s all AI slop to me. I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to work with it or use it.

>>mattl+Ut
Some people make these kinds of claims for ethical reasons, I get it. But be careful to not confuse one’s ethics with the current state of capability, which changes rapidly. Most people have a tendency to rationalize, and we have to constantly battle it.

Without knowing the commenter above, I’ll say this: don’t assume an individual boycott is necessarily effective. If one is motivated by ethics, I think it is morally required to find effective ways to engage to shape and nudge the future. It is important to know what you’re fighting for (and against). IP protection? Human dignity through work? Agency to effect one’s life? Other aspects? All are important.

>>xpe+tG
I run a music community that’s been around for 16 years and many users are asking me what they can do to avoid AI in their lives and I’m going to start building tools to help.

Many of the people pushing for a lot of AI stuff are the same people who have attached their name to a combination of NFTs, Blockchain, cryptocurrency, Web3 and other things I consider to be grifts/scams.

The term “AI” is already meaningless. So let’s be clear: Generative AI (GenAI) is what worries many people including a number of prominent artists.

This makes me feel like there’s work to be done if we want open source/art/the internet as we know it to remain and be available to us in the future.

It drives me a little crazy to see Mozilla adding AI to Firefox instead of yelling about it at every opportunity. Do we need to save them too?