It's interesting to see the collision of academic mindsets with the proliferation of AI. I largely agree with you: if something uses public data it should be offered as a public good.

It makes sense to me why it happened, though. Growing up, I always had the expectation that the stuff I put on the Internet would be there forever and basically used in ways that I wouldn't expect. I didn't feel the need to tell people what they could and could not learn from my posts and whatever tiny amount of learning I impart on a person feels perfectly analogous to whatever tiny amount of weight updates I'll provide to a model.

Academia felt very similar to me. We put out papers because we found the subjects interesting. We didn't make money from them (public funding) and people would build things on what we learned. It felt like a good model. Everyone shares the knowledge.

My biggest beef with AI isn't that they trained on the Internet, it's that they trained on the Internet and kept the result for themselves.

Additionally, minorities and underprivileged folks don't often have the means to get drivers licenses. How do you take the exam if you don't have a car to practice? Or can't get the time off work to go to the DMV for a government ID? It might not be the stated intent of the law, but the few places it's been implemented have seen drastic reductions in the incident rate of black and Latino voters.

Coffee and baked goods

Same.

I spent my life as a researcher in the ML space (now called AI) because I didn't want people to have to deal with the same hardships I did. I saw the incredible strides we made in search and creative tooling. Nobody else will have to spend days rotoscoping a character. We will be able to find any picture just by searching for a blurry, low resolution one.

But it's turning into a system that is used to funnel money from the most vulnerable population into the coffers of the wealthy. Instead of equalizing, it's exacerbating inequality.

As I see it, a model trained on pubic data should be a public good. You can charge people at cost for inference and training, but unless you provided the data you're obligated to give the weights back.

There's a lot of hostility to AI and I think a lot of it is ill informed or ignorant. People are opposed to data centers, but they're focused on the "AI" part, when in reality said data centers use less water than laws and serve more than just AI. They give you Nerflix and search results and YouTube. (Not to say it's never an issue, just that there's more nuance. Water constrained areas are not a good place for data centers.) I'm personally more opposed to data centers because it prevents me from owning my own hardware. I want to buy a thing and use it as I desire. I don't want to pay a subscription fee to use my own computer.

There are a host of other objections, but I'll leave it here for now. There are a lot of good reasons for hating LLMs, but mostly people jump on the bandwagon and hate them for stupid or inaccurate reasons, preventing us from having productive conversations.

For comparison: that's flushing the toilet about three times or showering for about two minutes.

CAIT: Collective Action in Tech and the Tech Workers Coalition are both trying. Support them as best you can.

Normalize it. Use meters and kilograms on your own even before legislation. Convince others to use it. Push back the storm. If a handful of people in your town use it then it goes from something that nobody uses to a thing that a few people (and the rest of the world) use. Be the change you want to see.

I'm less concerned with the jamming of a major highway and more concerned with three or four companies having a defacto monopoly on the Internet. AWS, GCP, and Azure host what? 90% of all traffic? 99%? Considering how many providers have them as a direct dependent, the "own nothing and like it" prospect looms ominously to me. The Internet should be a decentralized service owned by people and lots of small companies, not a handful of corporations.

Looked it up. 1974 for the credit act. Thanks for the correction! Edited my comment.

If you're being serious, there are lots of reasons ranging from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria to things like the systemic disenfranchisement of women in modern society.

Fun fact: when were women in the United States allowed to have bank accounts?

A: Since the founding in 1776

B: 1870's

C: 1970's

D: Oh God it's 1970's, isn't it?

Answer: 1974, when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed.

(EDIT: this answer previously said 1970 instead of 1974. Thank you to u/elephantium for the correction.)

Joke's on you. The porch pirate that stole my replacement GPU ruined my day before you even got here!