It’s 11:43pm on a Monday night. My 6-week-old son is asleep in my office so my wife can get some uninterrupted rest for the first half of the night. He’s finally asleep now, and I probably should be also after a full day of work. But I’m not done for the day. Even though I’m a software engineer by trade, I’m also a computer programmer by hobby and passion. So I do what I’ve been doing for well over a decade now: I boot up my computer to write some code.
Yep. Same problem we have with AI use of free-to-view literature and art. The author’s intent is often to invite others to participate in a collective effort, and start an ongoing conversation where works can be shared back and forth and everyone improves as a result.
Corpo use of FOSS — and especially ML training on free-to-view works — often takes the fruits of the collective effort and then sprints directly away from the community, refusing to participate and sometimes even wrapping a thin for-profit layer around the free underlying tools.
In the case of AI, this for-profit wrapper is so comprehensive and so thoroughly obscures any reference to the source material that not only can it replace the original communities very effectively, but it denies any ability to navigate through to the original communities even if you wanted to.