alt Hacker NewsIt's highly debatable whether, in case of an information sharing/gift economy, the concept of "bad actors coming in and ruining it for everybody by taking without giving back" even makes sense.
The information is still there, as is the community that you've built, the joy that you get out of sharing the information, everything you've learned...
Why is any of that diminished, just because some people or entities that you dislike also got something out of it?
Replies
It's diminished because the hard reality is that you need money to live.
The end result of major tech companies sweeping in, taking everyone's creative work, outcompeting the originals with AI derivatives, and telling every artist on the planet "fuck off, send a job application to McDonalds" is significantly less art.
Copyright was invented to prevent exactly this scenario.
> whether ... the concept of "bad actors coming in and ruining it for everybody by taking without giving back" even makes sense.
This is pretty clearly answered by the GPL: yes, it does, and this concept has been around since the very beginning.
> The information is still there
True
> as is the community that you've built
Untrue. At this point it's well understood that AI is substitutionary for many of the services that would have once afforded people a way to monetize their production for the community. Without the ability to make a living by doing so, even a small one, people will be limited to doing only what they can in the little free time they get outside of work.
That's the whole problem -- that AI, as it exists today, is taking away from the public, and hurting it at the same time. That's closer to robbery than it is to "sharing in the community".
I would take up that debate.
Attribution is seemingly a central part of a information sharing/gift economy, and especially in a information sharing/gift community. It is part of the trust that connects people and without it the community falls apart, and with that the economy. AI by its very nature removes attribution.
Accuracy of information is a second critical aspect of information sharing and communities that are built around it. Would Wikipedia as a community and resource work if some articles was just random words? If readers don't trust the site, and editors distrust each other, the community collapses and the value of the information is reduced. It might look like adding AI generated articles would not harm other existing articles, or the joy that editors of the past had in writing them, but the harm is what happen after the community get flooded by inaccurate information. Same goes for many other information sharing communities.