alt Hacker News> It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up
Learning isn’t stealing. They didn’t take our culture away from us and nobody is “buying our culture back” from them. We never lost it; it never went anywhere.
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Isn't that the same point piracy advocates have been making for a while? If I watch a pirated film, I didn't really consume a physical resource. Nothing physical is lost. Therefore it's not theft?
>Learning isn’t stealing.
This is cheesy. There is an exposure to (and a gain from) a resource that is traditionally associated with a cost. That cost wasn't paid. It's a public good to have information available, but it's not really acceptable to circumvent established ways of compensating the creator of the work you're benefiting from.
Imagine someone asks you how to do something at work, you tell them. Then they create a huge packet filled with bullshit about how it got done and now they are your boss.
That's true. However it does sometimes feel like our culture is being buried in slop.
Yes, you are getting a laundered version for a monthly payment to the rent seekers, who are 1000x worse than the RIAA.
And the internet is destroyed by slop spam in the process, so our culture is diluted and crowded out.
Partially true.
If StackOverflow dies because nobody uses it anymore, the entirety of its knowledge is now only available through LLMs that trained on it.
If a blog dies out because the author gave up writing, the entirety of its knowledge is now only available through LLMs that trained on it.
If people stop writing books because they cant outcompete generated content, that knowledge is also lost to LLMs.
If people stop making art because they can't outcompete generated art, that is also lost to LLMs.
So yeah, they haven't directly taken anything away, but the consequences of what they are doing may still have that outcomes - and it does look like that's the version of reality we're about to get.