this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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He might have had a leg to stand on here if this was an AI that he had trained himself on ethically-sourced data, but personally I don't want to be lectured by anyone about "our current capitalist culture" who is intentionally playing right into it by financially supporting the companies at the center of the AI bubble. The very corporations that are known to have scraped countless terabytes of unlicensed data for their own for-profit exploitation, by the way.
If you discard your self-proclaimed values the second that it becomes convenient or "valuable", you never had any values to begin with.
Practice what you preach, or don't preach at all.
Ethically sourced data is a hilarious phrase.
Why? You really don't see any difference between training an AI model off of public domain, creative commons and licensed data, and corporations like Meta and Anthropic pirating millions of books without even so much as consent from the original authors?
I wouldn't have a problem with AI if it was trained legitimately, but sadly working people are being ripped off by massive corporations on an unprecedented scale.
I think that, considering the goal of ensuring the LLM doesn't directly reproduce the training data, it really doesn't matter. I don't think trillions of characters arranged into words so something can spit out the most likely combination of those words back at me really has anything to do with how those words are sourced.
I also have no issue with piracy and think IP laws are currently way too strongly in favor of IP holders. Maybe my moral compass is off or something, idk.
To me it's a question of "fair use", is it fair for the richest for-profit tech corporations on Earth to scrape every book, painting and song from the internet without so much as basic consent or compensation for the benefit of their shareholders, or not?
You have to concede that all of these companies, be it OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, etc., wouldn't have an LLM product at all without a massive quantity of high-quality training data. Even OpenAI themselves have admitted this fact in court, claiming that it would be impossible for them to achieve the desired result without infringing on other people's works.
Are you the type of person who believes that "profit is exploitation" by any chance? Marxism is popular on here, right?
So let's forget about copyright and start talking about "exploitation"...
They have no product without our labor.
There is no "OpenAI Studio Ghibli filter" for Altman to profit off of, without the artwork of Hayao Miyazaki, Kazuo Oga, and multitudes of other lower-level workers who are certainly not as well off as the tech billionaires.
What the "AI" industry all comes down to is an unprecedented exploitation of other people's intellectual labor for profit. It's not some great talent equalizer as some delusional people seem to think it is. It is a vehicle by which the richest members of the corporate ownership class are taking the work of the creative class, and have now created an investment bubble in which just about all of the money flows up to the top.
Over the last few years of this bubble are we seeing any real benefit to society or humanity? No.
Oligarchs like Altman, Zuckerberg and Musk are the only people reaping the financial benefits of everyone else's work.
Your moral compass is probably fine. But like the person above who compared LLMs to pirating photoshop, I think you're just not seeing the forest for the trees. We can agree to disagree, but I'm not happy about what is effectively modern day robber barons.
intellectual property is part of the capitalist culture FYI
As is FOSS licensed software... Copyright and license notices at the top of every source file.
So, why should anyone respect the GPL or even the MIT license when they can simply ignore it and exploit the work of the open source community?
I don’t think they should? IP stifles innovation and artistic expression.
Well, then I guess you're not such a fan of "open source" as the developer of Lutris is, because he has chosen to maintain the copyright of his work and license his code under the GPLv3.
As a believer in FOSS myself, I think it's hypocritical that he expects people to respect the license attached to his code when he is choosing not to respect the licenses of others.
You can run your own ai models locally. Even if they were trained by the evil corporations. Do you also feel the same way about artists who pirated photoshop? Does that devalue their work?
If this is the best argument the pro-AI crowd has left at this point then you've lost all ability to reason...
Pirating Photoshop is, at worst, taking advantage of Adobe, a multi-billion dollar corporation. They are still very profitable and their employees still got paid to do the work. We can debate the ethics of software piracy all day, and I would argue you're better off investing your mental energy in FOSS, but in the end I think the social impact of people pirating Photoshop is quite small.
Compare this to generative AI which is built on the unprecedented exploitation of all human arts, culture and intellectual labor without any form of consent or compensation. All for the benefit of the richest tech oligarchs who are more than happy to sell you a subscription to a product that they stole from the creative class.
Who is benefitting the most from the AI bubble, the starving artist or the wealthy investor? The thoughtful engineer or the slop slinger? The workers or the suits?
No matter what way you slice it, you're not "sticking it to the man", you are the man. He shouldn't embarrass himself by blaming "capitalism" when he has shown that he is just as willing to exploit other people's labor as the next guy--hes just stupid enough to do it for pennies to the AI billionaires dollar.
My point was it AI is a tool. You can either use it or you dont. You speak of it being 'expliotive' but the world would be much better if copyright didnt exist and intellectual material was simply made available to everyone.
Do you create, or just consume?
A world without copyright would be significantly worse for the people who makes things, like writers, artists, musicians, etc.
In the real world, with the current laws, nobody should be entitled to exploit other people's physical or intellectual labor. If profit is exploitation, then why wouldn't AI be?
So you support FOSS? So does that mean you believe source code should be GPL or some other similar license?
I do support FOSS, in fact I have written FOSS code as part of my job in the non-profit space for almost a decade. I'm thankful for all of the people who write code whether it's copyleft GPL or permissive MIT. But I still recognize that it's their code and that they are simply granting me a license to use it under certain conditions.
Generative AI takes those conditions and wipe their ass with them. I have a problem with that.
Would you agree all software should be FOSS?