alt Hacker NewsWhy would someone gladly provide their work as open source but draw the line at AI reading it and using that knowledge to help more programmers later? It makes no sense to me. I actively want all of my code to be read by AI.
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Doesn't seem inconsistent to me. I may want my code to be open source so that other humans can read it, understand it, build on it, and contribute to it.
I may also have a philosophical opposition to generative AI at the same time - there are plenty of environmental, societal, and intellectual-property costs that some may find unconscionable.
It's kind of breaking the social contract. Licences were drafted, conferences were held, and endless flamewars tried to codify what it means to collaboratively build, distribute, own and use open software.
Then came the model trainers, ignoring the entire discourse, reasoning: "if I can download it, it's mine too use". And then basically selling the resulting tech back to the community.
Not unlike big tech extracting money from open source, but at least the latter usually (somewhat maliciously) complied with the license.
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A couple of valid reasons:
+ they don’t want to pay the bandwidth costs
+ they don’t want to help train a model that might ultimately put them out of work.
I don’t personally agree that AI are taking out jobs, but I do think it’s still a reasonable concern others have so I would sympathise if that were the rationale.