I’m paying $200/mo for non-crap versions of said “general-purpose problem-solver tool”, which is not far from the median income of “everyone on the planet with Internet connection”. And I’m told I’m already getting a huge discount by using thousands of dollars of compute by raw API pricing. That just doesn’t sound like peanuts at all.

I'm anti IP in theory and practice. If this results in undermining vengeful protection of the Annas and the Aarons of the world, I'm all for it. But it's not, is it. If the corpus and the models were all free, that would be lovely, and qualitatively quite different.

but its not, the old IP model is still intact, except these guys get an exception. and they get to scream bloody murder about distillation. they get to use their massive funding to try to draw a moat around that knowledge and expression with the goal of rent seeking from this point onwards. I'm not supposed to be able to access the original works anymore, but instead the proprietary, newly biased, blender output that contains a little bit of it.

also not at fan of what its doing to the creative process, but you're right here. that's on us for being so easily seduced and not being able to limit ai usage to solving rote problems instead of creative ones.

"Give it out for free or serve for peanuts" is doing a lot of work here. The crowd should be skeptical that this will continue given how many times we have seen enshittification unfold before.

Before LLMs, "knowledge should be free" was a call to preserve an open playing field where everyone has the ability to access the intellectual labor of humanity so they can contribute, instead of letting a few institutions wall it off for a profit.

As knowledge is walled off behind these models, rent seeking will expand, "safety guardrails" will become more onerous, and the masses will lose their access. There are wonderful parallels between this and enclosure in Britain.

There's some nuance there you're purposefully/ignorantly supressing to create a more impactful fundamentalist observation, completely contrary to the comment you described above as :

"heart-string-pulling "life's work got appropriated" argument"

I think the water is very muddy in regards to this topic and comments like yours really highlight the distain some people have for others that have talking points about with things they create being thrown into a gargantuan 'blender' as you called it.

Except that no one is freeing or democratizing the knowledge. We all know that the plan is to take it, destroy original sources and then become the solo monopoly provider. The plan is to extract staggering amounts of money from the rest of us - they have to pay those debts. Plus, it is not an universal general-purpose problem-solver either.

I mean, actual plan is to "make humans obsolete", "make everyone unemployable" and create weird techno fascist utopia from Thiel money. I personally don't find those sci-fi parts likely to happen. But these people do actually mean them, so.

It is just a few months ago when they were dancing victory dance about how they destroyed all the film makers and artists (practically they did not), as if that was something praise worthy or aspirational.