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[return to "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"]
1. lolind+qq[view] [source] 2025-06-02 23:57:50
>>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.

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2. shiomi+Dh1[view] [source] 2025-06-03 09:21:39
>>lolind+qq
It's not just lazy, it's nonsense. The author is conflating piracy with plagiarism, even though the two are completely different issues.

Plagiarism is taking somebody else's work and claiming that you yourself created it. It is a form of deception, depriving another of credit while selling their accomplishments as your own.

Piracy on the other hand is the violation of a person's monopoly rights on distributing certain works. This may damage said person's livelihood, but the authorship remains clear.

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