Also, all this reminds me of drama in the Skyrim and Minecraft modding scenes, when devs publish stuff under Apache or MIT or whatever.
Then the devs find out they don’t like what others are doing with their code. Drama ensues.
…That’s kinda the deal with permissive licenses. Or posting publicly, like here on Lemmy. People will do things you don’t like with your code or content.
Eh, I don’t think it’s hypocritical to contribute to a commons and then get mad when someone comes along and tries to use the commons to undermine the commons.
Like yes, the commons is there to be used… but not to kill the commons.
https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/
The most important thing is to protect the people’s right to use open source / weight AI models without licensing. Because the AI companies permanently monopolizing AI models and collecting rent forever on the commons, that would be a tragedy. It would forever shift the balance of power to use advanced technology.
I’m not using AI.
Well truly profitable applications for LLMs are pretty limited so far, but they will come. Lets say you can replace a tax advisor / accountant with a specialized LLM agent (one that doesn’t hallucinate tax code lol). Imagine oyu have an open source project that uses a coding AI agent to frequently update and retrain the tax LLM with the new regulations and laws and unit tests all this. So it’s ultimately easy to use, you just talk to the tax AI agent. Or alternatively, because they managed to make open weight LLMs illegal because they are piracy because they use books and posts without permission to train and can’t afford to pay the license fees. Now everybody has to use a commercial AI tax service. At the same price at what it cost previously to hire a real human.
As AI models get better they replace human labor. This is a problem under capitalism, otherwise we could just all just be working less and chill. But it gets even worse if “we” (like the 99%) can’t make use of open source models. Then the plutocrats get to own this newly replaced labor as free labor and collect rent.
This is why I believe the IP argument of anti-AI is so dangerous. They can afford to pay license fees, we / open source can’t. See patents, or see healthcare insurance purposefully making healthcare costs go up.
In theory, it’s all supposed to be permissively licenced code and the opt out is more than other models give. I saw Starcoder as one of the more ethical models. I thought the underlying principals to be fair at least.
I’m interested in this gut hostility to it regardless. Kind of shows how you can’t present LLMs in a positive angle no matter what. They shouldn’t be using anything GPL or similar.
Machine learning is more than just “transformative use” and is not copying. Currently that is only like 98% true, because memorization does occur in a few cases. Like 0.8-2% and that number is probably less now 2 years later than that study. Ultimately once they fix the memorization issue and “purge” these memories and can no longer reproduce licensed code (which is mostly textbook examples and boilerplate code or very popular code) this will be true transformative learning.
Then they do not require any more permission to read and learn from a book or from code than a human would. As long as you own a book or have the right to read something, you’re allowed to do whatever you want with the knowledge you gained.


