alt Hacker NewsI'm old enough to remember a time when the primary hacker cause was DRM, the DMCA, patent trolls, export controls for PGP, etc. All things that made it difficult to use information when you want to. "Information wants to be free."
It's wild to see the about face. Now it's:
> If [companies] can’t source training data ethically, then I see absolutely no reason why any website operator should make it easy for them to steal it.
It would have been very difficult to predict this shift 25 years ago.
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This claim of contradiction has never worked for me.
Let say person A wants everyone to be rich.
Person B plots a plan to make themself rich and everyone else poorer.
One can make an argument that any action by A is now a contradiction. If they work with B, it makes a lot of people poorer and not richer. If they work against B, B do not get rich.
However this is not a contradiction. If a company use training data in ways that reduce and harm other peoples ability to access information, like hiding attribution or misrepresenting the data and sources, people who advocate for free information can have a consistent view and also work against such use. It is not a shift. It is only a shift if we believe that copyright will be removed, works will be given to the public for free, and companies will no longer try to hide and protect creative works and information.
Those people where trying to build a sharing/gift economy. They weren't able to keep bad actors out of their sharing economy. They are bitter that their utopian dreams got hijacked by self-dealers. Why is that wild?
"Information wants to be free, but only be used by people I wholly endorse." is the motto. You'll see young people singing the praises of piracy but then use "piracy" as an excuse for hating LLMs.
Hackers are not one big homogeneous group (although there definitely are larger trends, and maybe you have a point there).
Still, people were saying all kinds of inane stuff 25 years ago too.
It becomes a bit easier to see when you finish the sentence. "Information wants to be free (from ______)." If you filled that blank in with "rent-seeking Capitalists and corporations," you likely have everything you need to understand why they don't see it as a turn.
I say this as someone whose notions exist orthogonal to the debate; I use AI freely but also don't have any qualms about encouraging people to upend the current paradigm and pop the bubble.
Politics will make more sense once you realize no one is trying to have consistent principles.
People are in general for whatever they think will benefit them, and against what they think will harm them.
So piracy is ok when it benefits the little guy and not ok when it benefits the big guy. Unions are good when they stand up against employers, and bad when they discriminate against non-union workers. There's no contradiction there.
This is what happens when a culture doesn't have robust exclusionary mechanisms for people who want to burn it down.
We welcomed the vampires in and wonder why our necks hurt.