> That’s throwing the baby out with the bath water.
it's not
the parasites can't train their shitty "AI" if they don't have anything to train it on
it's not
the parasites can't train their shitty "AI" if they don't have anything to train it on
It will however reduce the positive impact your open source contributions have on the world to 0.
I don't understand the ethical framework for this decision at all.
I'm not surprised that you don't understand ethics.
I couldn't care less if their code was used to train AI - in fact I'd rather it wasn't since they don't want it to be used for that.
which is the exact opposite of improving the world
you can extrapolate to what I think of YOUR actions
my comments on the internet are now almost exclusively anti-"AI", and anti-bigtech
My position on all of this is that the technology isn't going to uninvented and I very much doubt it will be legislated away, which means the best thing we can do is promote the positive uses and disincentivize the negative uses as much as possible.
they're using your exceptional reputation as a open-source developer to push their proprietary parasitic products and business models, with you thinking you're doing good
I don't mean to be rude, but I suspect "useful idiot" is probably the term they use to describe open source influencers in meetings discussing early access
IMHO their are going to be consequences of these negative effects, regardless of the positives.
Looking at it in this light, you might want to get out now, while you still can. Im sure its going to continue, its not going to be legislated away, but it's still wrong to be using this technology in the way it's being used right now, and I will not be associated with the harmful effects this technology is being used for because a few corporations feel justified in pushing evil on to the world wrapped positives.
I think of LLMs as more like the invention of cars or railways: enormous negative externalities, but provided enough benefit to humanity that we tend to think they were worthwhile.
Are the negatives of LLMs really that bad? Most of them look more like annoyances to me.
The ones that upset me the most are the ChatGPT psychosis episodes which have lead to loss of life. I'm reassured by the fact that the AI labs are taking genuine steps to reduce the risk of that happening, which seems analogous to me to the development of car safety features.
If bringing fire to a species lights and warms them, but also gives the means and incentives to some members of this species to burn everything for good, you have every ethical freedom to ponder whether you contribute to this fire or not.
For your fire example, there's a difference between being Prometheus teaching humans to use fire compared to being a random villager who adds a twig to an existing campfire. I'd say the open source contributions example here is more the latter than the former.
"It barely changes the model" is an engineering claim. It does not imply "therefore it may be taken without consent or compensation" (an ethical claim) nor "there it has no meaningful impact on the contributor or their community" (moral claim).
if true, then the parasites can remove ALL code where the license requires attribution
oh, they won't? I wonder why
There's also plenty of other open source contributors in the world.
> It will however reduce the positive impact your open source contributions have on the world to 0.
And it will reduce your negative impact through helping to train AI models to 0.
The value of your open source contributions to the ecosystem is roughly proportional to the value they provide to LLM makers as training data. Any argument you could make that one is negligible would also apply to the other, and vice versa.
Not if most of it is machine generated. The machine would start eating its own shit. The nutrition it gets is from human-generated content.
> I don't understand the ethical framework for this decision at all.
The question is not one of ethics but that of incentives. People producing open source are incentivized in a certain way and it is abhorrent to them when that framework is violated. There needs to be a new license that explicitly forbids use for AI training. That may encourage folks to continue to contribute.
In both cases I get the frustration - it feels horrible to see something you created be used in a way you think is harmful and wrong! - but the world would be a worse place without art or open source.
Well maybe the AI parasites should have thought of that.
My point was that the hypothetical of "not contributing to any open source code" to the extent that LLMs had no code to train on, would not have made as big of an impact as that person thought, since a very large majority of the internet is text, not code.
Unless you're in the camp that believes ChatGPT can extrapolate outside of its training data and do computer programming without having ever trained on any computer programming material?
I see this as doing so at scale and thus giving up on its inherent value is most definitely throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
this is precisely the idea
add into that the rise of vibe-coding, and that should help accelerate model collapse
everyone that cares about quality of software should immediately stop contributing to open source