AI as a tool for unleashing the devastating power of unregulated capitalism against its enemies, what a brilliant coup by the techbros and banksters. Not to mention the actual breakdown of community sites by AI scrapers, mostly using dirty botnet hacking techniques. This poison will eat itself one way or another. The question is: what can we do to make this happen sooner than later?

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.

So the issue is that AI strips the provenence of the open source contributors and then the output it spits out based on the data it consumed is not subject to the same open source licensing that applies to the open source projects, and these AI companies make profit from this but the open source contributors don't see a dime. We'll that's kinda always been the case though, so many amazing open source projects get coopted by tech giants like Microsoft and then repackaged as proprietary software for a profit, embrace, extend, extinguish, but back then they needed a team of developers to do that, now it's more automated I guess with AI

Also:

https://eyeofthesquid.com/ai-is-breaking-the-moral-foundation-of-modern-society-a145d471694f

AI renders [Rawls' and Nozick's] disagreement moot by violating the premise they shared. When your talents become training data harvested without consent, when your creative work becomes parameters in a model, you’re being used as a pure instrument. Not for social benefit (Rawls’s concern) and not with your voluntary consent (Nozick’s requirement). You’re raw material extracted for someone else’s capital accumulation. Both philosophers would recognize this as the instrumentalization they were trying to prevent.

Cloudflare drafted the Content Signals Policy which complement licenses.

The Content-Signal directive works by signaling your preference of either allowing (yes) or disallowing (no) certain categories of AI actions

It references existing EU law, ie the DSA. It's good to set clear policy and terms of use scrappers can parse. It's new so I suspect most don't honor this yet. But once they get caught, the website could argue this violate term of use.

# ANY RESTRICTIONS
# EXPRESSED VIA CONTENT
# SIGNALS ARE EXPRESS
# RESERVATIONS OF RIGHTS
# UNDER ARTICLE 4 OF THE
# EUROPEAN UNION DIRECTIVE
# 2019/790 ON COPYRIGHT AND
# RELATED RIGHTS IN THE
# DIGITAL SINGLE MARKET.

IANAL, consult with a law profesionnal for advice on how to enforce this legally.

I think the HOW and WHY here are really important:

By incorporating copyleft data into their models, the LLMs do share the work - but not alike. Instead, the AI strips the work of its provenance and transforms it to be copyright free.

That is because the US copyright office has rightly advised that AI generated works are not copyrighted.

So crucially, here, we have them gobbling up methods and ideas and passing them off as their own, stripping the code of its copyright protection.

There's a whole other argument to be made about whether the cod actually works, but that feels too close to being apologist for me.