FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies • Hacker News Board

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#291

Post by outside1234 » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #30

pjc50 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just burning their goodwill to the ground AI firms seem to be leading from a position that goodwill is irrelevant: a $100bn pile of capital, like an 800lb gorilla, does what it wants. AI will be incorporated into all products whether you like it or not; it will absorb all data whether you like it or not.

Yep. And it is much more far reaching than that. Look at the primary economic claim offered by AI companies: to end the need for a substantial portion of all jobs on the planet. The entire vision is to remake the entire world into one where the owners of these companies own everything and are completely unconstrained. All intellectual property belongs to them. All labor belongs to them. Why would they need good will…

The thing is that this will be their destruction as well. If workers don't have any money (because they don't have jobs), nobody can afford what the owners have to sell?

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#292

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 2:48 PM UTC

macinjosh wrote: post #239

pjc50 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is copyrighted. There's ongoing lawsuits about whether AI training counts as copyright infringement; e.g. Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence https://www.debevoise.com/insights/publications/2025/02/an-e... However, they could just do an end run round this. In the UK they're planning to get the government to help them just grab everything for free: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/copyright-and-ar...

Whatever happened to terms of use and EULAs? These big companies use them against individuals all the times, why can't small sites state in their Terms of Use or put up a EULA that states no crawling/copying is allowed. Shouldn't that open up avenues to sue?

> These big companies use them against individuals all the times

There's your answer. Lawfare works in favor of the party with deeper pockets.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#293

Post by lithocarpus » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 2:48 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #85

UncleMeat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. And it is much more far reaching than that. Look at the primary economic claim offered by AI companies: to end the need for a substantial portion of all jobs on the planet. The entire vision is to remake the entire world into one where the owners of these companies own everything and are completely unconstrained. All intellectual property belongs to them. All labor belongs to them. Why would they need good will…

> remake the entire world into one where the owners of these companies own everything and are completely unconstrained how has this been any different from the past 10,000 years of human conquest and domination?

In my view it's the same thing, same trajectory -- with more power in the hands of fewer people further along the trajectory.

It can be better or worse depending on what those with power choose to do. Probably worse. There has been conquest and domination for a long time, but ordinary people have also lived in relative peace gathering and growing food in large parts of the world in the past, some for entire generations. But now the world is rapidly becoming unable to support much of that as abundance and carrying capacity are deleted through human activity. And eventually the robot armies controlled by a few people will probably extract and hoard everything that's left. Hopefully in some corners some people and animals can survive, probably by being seen as useful to the owners.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#294

Post by krapp » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 2:49 PM UTC

ewzimm wrote: post #214

krapp wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xanadu was Ted Nelson, not Tim Berners-Lee. Also I would argue that not having capitalist incentives baked directly into the network is what made the web work, for good or bad. Xanadu would never have gotten off the ground if people had to pay their ISP then pay for every website, or every packet, or every clicked link or whatever. Reading the Xanadu page on Wikipedia tells me "Every document can contain a royalty me…

Oops, you're right! They claimed that Tim Berners-Lee stole their idea. I agree that the lack of monetization was important to the development and that it would have been chaos as proposed, but will the current setup be sustainable forever in the world of AI? We have projects like Ethereum that are specifically intended to merge payments and computing, and I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future, some…

I hate AI as much as any reasonable person should, but I don't think money is a viable filter when governments and corporations will just throw as much money legislation and infrastructure at it as needed to render it irrelevant. They can just budget it in, or pass laws requiring privileged access.

Meanwhile as profit motives begin to dominate (as they inevitably would,) access to information and resources becomes more and more of a privilege than a right, and everything becomes more commercialized, faster.

I won't claim to have a better idea, though. The best solutions in my mind are simply not publishing anything to the web and letting AI choke on its own vomit, or poisoning anything you do publish, somehow.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#295

Post by slowmovintarget » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #10

ericholscher wrote: post #3

Yep -- our story here: https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse... (quoted in the OP) -- everyone I know has a similar story who is running large internet infrastructure -- this post does a great job of rounding a bunch of them up in 1 place. I called it when I wrote it, they are just burning their goodwill to the ground. I will note that one of the main startups in the space worked with us direct…

> just burning their goodwill to the ground AI firms seem to be leading from a position that goodwill is irrelevant: a $100bn pile of capital, like an 800lb gorilla, does what it wants. AI will be incorporated into all products whether you like it or not; it will absorb all data whether you like it or not.

"... you have the lawyers clean it all up later." - Eric Schmidt

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#296

Post by dbingham » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #277

rectang wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at the primary economic claim offered by AI companies: to end the need for a substantial portion of all jobs on the planet. And this is why AI training is not "fair use". The AI companies seek to train models in order to compete with the authors of the content used to train the models. A possible eventual downfall of AI is that the risk of losing a copyright infringement lawsuit is not going away. If a court d…

I've pointed this out to a few people in this space. They tend to suggest that the value in AI is so great this means we should get rid of copyright law entirely.

That value is only great if it's shared equitably with the rest of the planet.

If it's owned by a few, as it is right now, it's an existential threat to the life, liberty, and pursuit of a happiness of everyone else on the planet.

We should be seriously considering what we're going to do in response to that threat if something doesn't change soon.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#297

Post by otterpro » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 2:51 PM UTC

ThinkBeat wrote: post #253

Banning Edge to deal with the problem is probably not ideal. What I am thinking about may even be less idea. For people actively working on these projects how about puptting the git server on a private net with VPN or SSH access. Use a seperate read only static git server to the net.

Yes, this might be the best solution. and put read-only repo on github or some public facing host.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#298

Post by neilv » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 2:51 PM UTC

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #277

rectang wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at the primary economic claim offered by AI companies: to end the need for a substantial portion of all jobs on the planet. And this is why AI training is not "fair use". The AI companies seek to train models in order to compete with the authors of the content used to train the models. A possible eventual downfall of AI is that the risk of losing a copyright infringement lawsuit is not going away. If a court d…

I've pointed this out to a few people in this space. They tend to suggest that the value in AI is so great this means we should get rid of copyright law entirely.

That's a talking point for bros looking to exploit it as their ticket.

"The upside of my gambit is so great for the world, that I should be able to consume everyone else's resources for free. I promise to be a benevolent ruler."

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#299

Post by jsheard » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 2:52 PM UTC

throwaway173738 wrote: post #75

Does anyone maintain a list of ai products developed without scraping?

I don't know about text models, but most of the big stock photo companies are offering image generators trained on their own libraries rather than scraped images. Adobe, Getty, Shutterstock, iStock, possibly more. They're positioning themselves as the safe option while the legality of scraping is still up in the air.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#300

Post by vhcr » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 2:52 PM UTC

xena wrote: post #33

It's really surreal to see my project in the preview image like this. That's wild! If you want to try it: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis . So far I've noticed that it seems to actually work. I just deployed it to xeiaso.net as a way to see how it fails in prod for my blog.

Anubis is only going to work as long as it doesn't gets famous, if that happens crawlers will start using GPUs / ASICs for the proof of work and it's game over.