What I do care about is the theft of my identity. A person may learn from the words I write but that person doesn't end up mimicking the way I write. They are still uniquely themselves.
I'm concerned that the more I write the more my text becomes my identifier. I use a handle so I can talk more openly about some issues.
We write OSS and blog because information should be free. But that information is then being locked behinds paywalls and becoming more difficult to be found through search. Frankly, that's not okay
Of course they do, to some extent. Just because it's been infeasible to track the exact "graph of influence", that's literally how humans have learned to speak and write for as long as we've had language and writing.
> I'm concerned that the more I write the more my text becomes my identifier. I use a handle so I can talk more openly about some issues.
That's a much more serious concern, in my view. But I believe that LLMs are both the problem and solution here: "Remove style entropy" is just a prompt away, these days.
Oh, I wish I could get AI to mimic the way I write! I'd pay money for it. I often want to type up an email/doc/whatever but don't because of occasional RSI issues. If I could get an AI to type it up for me while still sounding like me - that would be a big boon for my health.
I also have this issues that often keep me from typing, but FYI dictation has gotten very good.
(Dictated this)
> people are making trillions off the free labor of people like you and me
I read "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" to also include LLMs and especially the cases that we most deeply disagree with.
Either we believe in the principles of OSS or we do not. If you do not like the idea of your intellectual property being used for commercial purposes then this model is definitely not for you.
There is no shame in keeping your source code and other IP a secret. If you have strong expectations of being compensated for your work, then perhaps a different licensing and distribution model is what you are after.
> that information is then being locked behinds paywalls and becoming more difficult to be found through search
Sure - If you give up and delete everything. No one is forcing you to put your blog and GH repos behind a paywall.
I've been writing open source for more than 20 years
I gave away my work for free with one condition: leave my name on it (MIT license)
the AI parasites then strip the attribution out
they are the ones violating the principles of open source
> then perhaps a different licensing and distribution model is what you are after.
I've now stopped producing open source entirely
and I suggest every developer does the same until the legal position is clarified (in our favour)
There are a lot of people developing open source software with a wide range of goals. In my case, I'm totally happy for LLMs to learn from my coding, just like they've learned from millions of other peoples. I wouldn't want them to duplicate it verbatim, but (due to copyright filters + that not usually being the best way to solve a problem) they don't.
> Either we believe in the principles of OSS or we do not.
Seriously, don't lick the boot. We can recognize that there's complexity here. Trivializing everything only helps the abusers.
Giving credit where credit is due is not too much to ask. Other people making money off my work can be good[0]. Taking credit for it is insulting
[0] If you're not making much, who cares. But if you're a trillion dollar business you can afford to give a little back. Here's the truth, OSS only works if we get enough money and time to do the work. That's either by having a good work life balance and good pay or enough donations coming in. We've been mostly supported by the former, but that deal seems to be going away
This is what AI scrapers are doing. They’re taking your code, your artwork and your writing without any consideration for the license.
There is an active case on this, where Microsoft has been sued over GitHub copilot, and it has been slowly moving through the court system since 2022. Most of the claims have been dismissed, and the prediction market is at 11%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...
I think it's entirely fair that even staunch supporters of OSS get turned off when AI companies scrape their work to ingest into a black box regurgitator and then turn around and tell the world how their AI will make trillions of dollars by taking away the jobs of those obsolete OSS developers, showing no intention of ever giving back to the community.