This is not new for companies to make money on the internet using the work and information others made without compensation for the community
Google search or stackoverfow did it long before LLMs, it’s just that the price is different, you pay with your attention spans instead of money
I’m pretty sure that we’ll have freely accessible LLMs with ads baked in a way you can’t even see them at first glance (if they aren’t doing it already)What’s new with LLMs is that the information source is hidden, no credit is attributed for people that contribute to the community anymore
which is why any opensource project should have strict restrictions about how companies are allowed to use it.
Welcome to the world of scientific publishing, long before AI. Except authors even have to pay for creating “content”, and reviewers are expected to work for free. Yet article access is sold at astronomical prices.
Tail as old as land
I did fine without AI, they can charge what they want.
Not buying it anywayJust further enshittification. Companies don’t make new things or new technologies anymore. They just find new ways to rent squat and extract fees. They’ve stolen everyone’s work, manufactured a way to give it to you first without you seeing the author’s material, and told everyone to use this method to access information so they can charge for it.
There is a license that says that all derivatives must also be open source.
But also AI companies don’t care about the law, they stole all their data, engage in insider trading, circular trading, and generating all manner of illegal content, they don’t give a fuck. And the US government isn’t doing anything to hold them accountable, infact the president is getting in on it.
they stole all there data
Obviously fuck the capitalists and AI scammers. But reading and learning from a library, then writing and selling your own book based on that is NOT stealing. It’s the wrong argument.
The answer obviously is to keep the actual source material and libraries and book archives open and just run open source AI models at home. You can run smaller versions on a solar powered PC no problem.
The issue with trying to make “AI is just stolen” happen is that it will make open source AI models illegal. AI companies would love that because they can afford to license and pay or work around or obscure or whatever. The “intellectual property” argument is always a disgusting capitalist one. Knowledge is either free or nothing is.
Library implies consent that was not there and access to the public that was not there.
Except these people are turning around and burningdown the libraries once they’ve read all the books.
But reading and learning from a library, then writing and selling your own book based on that is NOT stealing.
It could be argued that these AIs are not actually learning but collecting and rearranging. That’s still stealing in my book, especially if it happens on a massive industrial scale and by a megacorp instead of a person.
And the US government is doing anything
isn’t doing anything
Yeah that’s what I meant
And the US government is doing anything to hold them accountable
You probably meant “nothing” instead of “anything”?
Yes, all this is very much the product of the current US admin.
current wave of AI isn’t even new technology
We had predictive text. We had neural networks. We had both for more than few decades. Someone just decides “what if predictive text was built on neural network?” and it worked much better than old solution. In fact old solution worked pretty much like one-layer neural network.
TechBros literally took something we already had, made it more expensive and sold it to investors.
ehh not exactly. the current wave within ai was started in 2017 with the google paper “attention is all you need”, which introduced the transformer architecture (the T in GPT). deep neural networks were still used for NLP before this, it was just LSTMs instead of transformers, which had various limitations
That is how capitalism works.
The American Weather Service provided weather updates for free, but a company came along and just started copying what the weather service posted … then sued the Weather Service for publicly posting the weather because the government is not allowed to provide a service for free that a company can charge for.
Insanity.
Same thing happened in Germany where the DWD collects and publishes weather data. Wetter.de came along and sued them, forcing them to hide features in their app (developed and paid for by tax money) behind a paywall. That was later overturned, but I still refuse to use their site
Government issues the business licenses. Seems like someone needs to be reminded who has who by the balls.
In case anyone didn’t know the answer is business as in business has the government by the balls.
As intended by the founding fathers, of course
Only 20 years? My techguyforum screen name is damn near 30 years old at this point. (Don’t go there. Site is ruined trash, now. ) I been giving info to help with shit since even before then. Internet has my fingerprints in it since the early 90’s.


…Seriously?
This guy has no leg to stand on; that’s the Mildly Infuriating part.
EDIT: Am I the only one on Lemmy who discounts the whole post the moment I see a blue checkmark?
Especially this one. It’s so hypocritical it hurts.
Steal the idea. Paraphrase it and screenshot it as your own! Victorii /s
…Also how capitalism works, according to another post here.
Don’t discount the message though. After all we’re interacting with a screenshot of a tweet. It doesn’t make me a fan of this guy.
I think other people can buy the blue checkmark for you on twitter, though my information may be faulty.
In any case, just cause he gave money to that ass wipe Elon doesn’t mean that his analogy isn’t valid, just a little “leopards ate my face” kinda deal.
Well, he tweets many times a day, many posts like this:

…Seems like a “Tech Bro” type to me. He’s just engagement farming; I don’t care what he says, there nothing valid about that.
In fact, I’d wager some of those posts are automated.
Yeah okay, fair enough, he looks like a moron.
I’m kind of with you on this, but even broken clocks
I think twitter also might still give blue check marks to “important” people it’s just available for anyone to buy now
lol
You either do it, or someone else will do it and start impersonating you. People with any kind of public/online presence sorta have to unfortunately.
they can still impersonate you. the checkmark has lost its meaning when everybody has it.
Coincidentally, OOP just explained academic publishing to a T.
A parasite can take different shapes but only one form.
Sort of. Unless you go to a private university taxes go to the public schools to fun facilities and wages for the educators. While you may pay tuition, the overall cost of that education and the services needed for one to do research doesn’t come wholely out of your pocket.
Now I agree you should be compensated more, as someone who tried to get published academically and has filed patents I can see why there is a split of compensation.
Wdym? Scientists usually don’t get paid to publish. The person you replied to, probably meant academic publishing as in:
- Scientist does research and compiles manuscript, usually via public money, even in shithole countries like the US
- Scientist submits manuscript to for profit journal
- Journal outsources proofreading to other scientists, who do it for free
- Manuscript is accepted or revised on scientists time and money
- Scientist pays for publishing
- For Profit journal either charges extra for “open” publication or charges scientist and other scientists for access, usually by agreements with the respective library
- Profit! (On the journals part)
Where is the split of compensation? For patents there is, but for academic publishing usually not.
You are missing the point, it’s not about education, but publishing. Read about Elsevier, and how Aaron Swartz died
The library is still there. Admission is still free.
while the library itself is covered in a thick layer of slop as the librarian can’t keep up anymore and the road signs pointing at the library are taken down
the library was run on donations and someone copied all the books and is selling a service that summarizes them on a lot right in front of it. you can still go around and give your donation inside but most people don’t and the library is starting to fall apart. also the summaries kind of suck.
I think this is the story of humanity. It ain’t getting better until we massacre the inhumanly rich, eat Thier families while the world watches, and force evil socialism on shared intellectual property
Follow me for more bad advice
I don’t know the difference between bad advice and good advice anymore
Styrofoam and diesel are great for toppling governments. Douse the rich!
See, here’s the thing. Everybody loves to point at the guilitine, and the French Revolution. They love to say “Lets do what they did!”
Here’s the problem. Nobody talks about what came next.
Because what happened was, you had one group of rich assholes who controlled everything, and treated everybody else like shit. So the French chopped off their heads, and got rid of these rich assholes.
And what happened next? Well, a lot of infighting, but the end result was instead of having a group of rich assholes controlling everyone, you instead had a different group of not rich assholes controlling everyone, who thengot rich from it. And nothing changed.
I think, before we go around killing everyone, we need a plan. We need to figure out why humans are so quick to all clump up as one submissive blob, who follows the will of whoever claims to have power.
Instead of 1 president, or 1 dictator, I think we should instead have a panel of 1 million people. Tens of thousands of people from every state. Anyone can apply, and if need be, your individual county can run sn election if you’re not running unopposed.
This I think would cut down tremendously on corruption in our government. Because a company couldn’t just bribe 1 president. They’d need to bribe 1 million people.
And the comittee would always represent the people, because they ARE the people. Most people would know at least 1 committee member in their neighborhood.
THEN you can kill all the rich assholes.
It’s like you invented democracy with extra sauce 😁👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
We need to figure out why humans are so quick to all clump up as one submissive blob, who follows the will of whoever claims to have power.
because people like when decisions are made for them, and they don’t have to think to make those decisions for themselves.
The French Revolution was succesful. What the king & nobles did before that was much, much worse.
It just wasn’t a socialist revolution. The bourgeoisie won.
It also didn’t happen just like that, it took 10 years - Wikipedia calls it “a period of political and societal change”. I think it’s fair to say it wasn’t completely unplanned.
It led directly to Napoleon conquering Europe and crowning himself Emperor of France…
Wealth cap or bust. No one should ever be able to make 1 billion. I think there should be forced divestments after 1 bil and you’re barred from the stock market for 5 years. Plus☝🏻, if you use any money to build anything whether it be a building or a business, said billionaire is not allowed to earn more than a total of 1 million/yr.
This only sounds good to people who are ignorant of both economics and history. Wealth caps, rent control, fixed prices, etc all sound nice until you take a minute to learn about the side effects. These sorts of policies aren’t knew, but they don’t work which is why they haven’t stuck around.
At this point in time just blow out everyone’s bank accounts and start over again.
That sounds like a cat and mouse game. You make a rule that person A can’t be on the stock market for 5 years. This does two things. First, it causes rich people to find some loophole or exploit.
And second, it just disincentivizes them from using the stock market at all, in favor of some unregulated form of making money. Like crypto.
Now you could say “Well then we’ll place caps on how much you can trsnsfer crypto over to american currency”.
And now you’re in a cat and mouse game. Because now they just need to convert it to some foreign currency. Then convert the foreign currency to American currency.
See? Cat and mouse.
See, this idea thread is putting up fences to seperate the corrupt from illicit gains. You build a fence, they bring a ladder. You build a bigger fence, they bring a bigger ladder. You build a wall, they install a window. The incentive is always there to overcome the barrier.
Instead, we should be finding ways to make bringing a bigger ladder cost more than the gains. Rewrite the whole system so that all people benefit before the greedy have a chance to hoard it all.
Regulate every system. Regulate every persons finances. If they cheat the system, make them pay twice the gains they got. Then distribute those fines to fund education and poor neighborhoods.
Suddenly you don’t need to worry about how big their ladder is, because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
What do you mean by forced divestments?
Oh and are you going to hard code these numbers into the law? Because rich people would respond by deflating the currency to the point where the average person makes 10 cents a day and a millionaire is inflation-equivalent to a billionaire today.
Or they’ll split a 10 billion dollar company between 20 of their closest friends and family, 500 million each, to stay under the cap.
Or a thousand other loopholes people will use. Take a company private and just declare it at worth only a million.
forced divestments
Selling off half their stocks or ¼ of their their majority share to lower their stake in their own businesses so their wealth is stifled.
Selling it to who though? And who gets the money from the sale? Taxes? But rich people already control the government…
There needs to be a little killing first, to set the tone. I like your ideas, but there is no way in this world or any other that the rich assholes would allow you to assemble a committee like that. They would literally carpet bomb it before allowing it.
The majority of people don’t like to lead. It’s simply easier and more comfortable to follow. Less conflict. Less confrontation. Less stress.
Leading requires initiative, the capacity to be confrontational, to step outside the box. It’s rather opposite of what is known as the bandwagon effect. Most people cannot do any of that without feeling extremely self conscious or anxious. Or, without being obnoxious and off-putting. You not only have to be able to function separate, you have to do it without annoying the fuck out of those around you.
Effective leadership also requires the capacity for some degree of speed. Some problems cannot wait for debate due to safety.
The bandwagon effect is a fun bit of study. What’s even better is the majority of people believe it doesn’t hold sway over them when the data shows that it absolutely does, something like 70-80%. It’s why, in part, so much money is thrown at AI and bots on social media, especially pre elections.
This appears to be a long but solid definition of it, with some easy bullet points: https://www.researchprospect.com/what-is-the-bandwagon-effect/
There’s also a reverse bandwagon effect, for, you know, the cool people.
Dibs on ribs
Rfk has peen dibs
Not to mention those same companies obsessed with AI are the ones who run the search engines. They made finding all those tutorials and other good resources harder. They ruin search results with ads and easily gamed algorithms that they stopped trying to improve. All that made people more willing to let the AI find the answer.
It all makes sense when you realize that AI isn’t the product, control is.
When everyone depends on cloud services, especially storage, because they can’t afford hard drives or RAM anymore. Do you think the average normie is going to “stand up for principles of privacy and freedom of computing” or are they gonna say “it is what it is” and buy a tablet with 8GB of RAM and an office suite in the cloud?
Do you think these companies are above scanning everyone’s stuff to find out who is against them? Who is developing some great new idea? Who dissents the government?
Do you think these companies are above editing all saved copies of a news article and replacing it with something AI generated that looks real enough to memory hole something? (Copies of things in the cloud are already de-duplicated)
They don’t want us to be able to point out their flaws anymore. They want us to be submissive to them.
They’ve already broadcast their intentions to push cloud compute for home use. These data centers train AI - but chips are improving rapidly. Amazon and others have already stated they plan to use these for cloud compute services as they become obsolete for bleeding edge AI. Microsoft has a low local resource client to cloud version of Windows they are releasing. They want all compute to be subscription based and it will definitely lack any real privacy protections as long as they can keep corporate capture of congress.
that sounds a bit too distopian, maybe in some 20 years but reakly at this point anything can happen.
Where have you been the last 20 years?
I would say at least 5 years for all of these things to be plausible, the world changes fast but like social media collaborating with every goverment to silence people against any of the 2 or even give them repercussions still has some years left to (if it is gonna) happen. Besides organizing with news companies and then replacing all news articles would take at least some months (besides from it being super noticeable and there being archives in other places).
I have indeed noticed Google (and Google-based search engines like Startpage) has got worse in the past months. Even DuckDuckGo is better now (which as a long time ddg user is wild)
Honestly ddg has also gotten worse (as it’s bing in a condom), it’s just that Google has shit itself even harder
Kagi is a paid service and feels weird to pay for a search engine, but things have felt so much better since I tried them out months ago.
I don’t know if you use their Assistant, but you can limit it to specific sources. The first option after the entire web is the fediverse. They also have the small web, which just shows you things made by actual humans, not something trying to sell you something.
I pay for Metager and i do really recommend it. You pay a pittance per search while being free of the crap that infests the net. Kagi comes with it’s own set of issues.
I’ll look into Metager as this is the first I’ve heard of it.
What set of issues do you see with Kagi? It’s the best I’ve encountered as of late, but if there’s more I should consider; I’d like to learn.
I mainly find their CEO problematic, and their focus on AI does not bode well for the future.
Thank you for sharing. I do now recall a couple of the items you addressed, and I’ll have to keep others in mind.
We can’t have anything nice… google, digg, Reddit, github, Kagi, proton mail. —at one point in time these were good. The rot or trajectory of rot seems inevitable.
I’m not anti AI, but it doesn’t need to be in everything all the time. It shouldn’t obfuscate data sources. It shouldn’t be allowed to consume and gather everything breaking laws that would apply to any individual and ought to be enforced for any corporate entity.
Pointing an AI at a larger company’s documentation or feeding a local one a largish manual and using it to figure out how or why 2, 3, or 4 parts work together has been useful for me in the past. Again where I can then get to the data to learn for myself.
Letting the pattern recognization machine (AI) assess a logfile or 3 that are intertwined to help find issues has been helpful.
Injecting it into every internet search where I never asked is wasteful and stupid.
I started noticing ddg search with the “” operator is wonky. Also ecosia seems to have a lot of sponsored results?
I’m at a point where I gladly pay for my search engine just to get good results.
One could argue we were always paying, with our data. But now we get less in return.
To be fair, Google has been fighting a war against SEO and spam basically since it was started.
I don’t think they intentionally degraded their search engine. I think they just diverted resources away from fighting spam and SEO and instead dedicated those resources to AI stuff. Intentionally degrading their search results would require work. They’d have to convince their high-paid employees that for some reason they should make the results worse. But, just letting the stuff rot naturally as SEOs kept up their attacks, that’s free.















