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FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

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Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#541

Post by joquarky »

pjc50 wrote: post #312
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…

There's already been an interesting ruling that a pure AI output is not, in itself, copyrightable.

I'm curious what will happen when someone modifies a single byte (or a "sufficient" number of bytes) of AI output, thereby creating a derivative work, and then claiming copyright on that modified work.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#542

Post by joquarky »

rectang wrote: post #356
eadmund wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI companies seek to train models in order to compete with the authors of the content used to train the models. When I read someone else’s essay I may intend to write essays like that author. When I read someone else’s code I may intend to write code like that author. AI training is no different from any other training. > If a court determines that the AI output you've used is close enough to be considered a de…

If you as an individual recognizably regurgitate the essay you read, then you have infringed. If an AI model recongnizably regurgitates the essay it trained on then it has infringed. The AI argument that passing original content through an algorithm insulates the output from claims of infringement because of "fair use" is pigwash.

I'm curious how this can be applied with the inevitable combinatorial exhaustion that will happen with musical aspects such as melody, chord progression, and rhythm.

Will it mean longer and longer clips are "fair use", or will we just stop making new content because it can't avoid copying patterns of the past?

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#543

Post by joquarky »

UncleMeat wrote: post #340
eadmund wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI companies seek to train models in order to compete with the authors of the content used to train the models. When I read someone else’s essay I may intend to write essays like that author. When I read someone else’s code I may intend to write code like that author. AI training is no different from any other training. > If a court determines that the AI output you've used is close enough to be considered a de…

Outcomes matter. Things that are fine at an individual level can become social harmful at scale.

What happens when a culture becomes overwhelmingly individualistic and becomes blind to the at-scale harms?

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#544

Post by anthk »

krapp wrote: post #117
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usenet, as far as I remember, used to be a fucking hell to maintain right. With each server having to basically mirror everything, it was a hog on bandwidth and storage, and most server software at its heyday was a hog on filesystems of its day (you had to make sure you have plenty of inodes to spare). The other day, I logged into Usenet using eternalseptember, and found out that it consisted in 95% of zombies sendin…

Culturally, the modern replacement for Usenet is probably Reddit. Architecturally, probably something built on top of a federated protocol like ActivityPub (Mastodon) or Nostr (Lemmy). But I guess realistically you can't fight entropy forever. Even Hacker News, aggressively moderated as it is, is slowly but irrevocably degrading over time.

I have a curated list of tech and science related newsgroups which work really well. No SPAM since Google Groups went to /dev/null.

Also, I often access FIDO over NNTP.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#545

Post by anthk »

diggan wrote: post #402
myaccountonhn wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing that says you can't charge money for FOSS software. FOSS is more about having the ability to inspect and freely change your software to your use-cases.

> There is nothing that says you can't charge money for FOSS software Well, yes and no. If you had a cost to access the source code, I'm pretty sure I'd stop calling that FOSS. If you only have a price for downloading binaries, sure, still FOSS, since we're talking source code licensing. > Nothing should be $$ free I took this statement at face value, and assumed parent argued for basically eliminating FOSS.

I used to buy Debian DVD's when there was the freest Linux distro before GNUinos and now Trisquel.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#546

Post by EvanAnderson »

pratik661 wrote: post #457

Could this lead to a situation where user agents also need to have their identities verified with a certificate authority the way websites do?

We'll be back to attestation in the browser (like Google's still-as-of-yet failed WEI proposal). It's coming.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#547

Post by m463 »

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…

I kind of suspect some of these companies probably have more horsepower and bandwidth in one crawler than a lot of these projects have in their entire infrastructure.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#548

Post by consteval »

robertlagrant wrote: post #482
ricudis wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's the ultimate fail of capitalist ethics - the notion that we must all work just so we can survive. Look at how many shitty and utterly useless jobs exist just so people can be employed on them to survive. This has to change somehow. "Machines will do everything and we'll just reap the profits" is a vision that techno-millenialists are repeating since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, but we haven…

> And that's the ultimate fail of capitalist ethics - the notion that we must all work just so we can survive. Look at how many shitty and utterly useless jobs exist just so people can be employed on them to survive. This isn't a consequence of capitalism. The notion of having to work to survive - assuming you aren't a fan of slavery - is baked into things at a much more fundamental level. And lots of people don't wo…

> This isn't a consequence of capitalism.

Yes, it is. The fact we have welfare isn't a refutation of that, it's proof. The welfare is a bandaid over the fundamental flaws of capitalism. A purely capitalist system is so evil, it is unthinkable. Those people currently on welfare should, in a free labor market, die and rot in the street. We, collectively, decided that's not a good idea and went against that.

That's why the labor market, and truly all our markets, are not free. Free markets suck major ass. We all know it. Six year olds have no business being in coal mines, no matter how much the invisible hand demands it.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#549

Post by ATechGuy »

prmoustache wrote: post #526
sir-alien wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we not just have a whitelist for allowed crawlers and ban the rest by default? Then places like DuckDuckGo and Google can provide a list of IP addresses that their crawlers will come from. Then simply just don't include major LLM providers like OpenAI

I am pretty sure a number of crawlers are running inside mobile apps of mobile phone users so they can get residential ip pools.

This is scary!

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#550

Post by forgetfreeman »

Ray20 wrote: post #439
forgetfreeman wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started a borderline smug response here pointing out how bullshit white collar and service jobs* where in deep shit but folks who actually work for a living would be fine. I scrapped it halfway through when it occurred to me that if everyone's broke then by definition nobody's spending money on stuff like contractors, mechanics, and other hardcore blue collar trades. Toss in AI's force multiplication of power deman…

>if everyone's broke >nobody's spending money on stuff like contractors, mechanics, and other hardcore blue collar trades. Why would this happen? Money is simply a medium of exchange of values that this contractors, mechanics and other hardcore blue collar trades are creating. How can they be broke, if Ai doesn't disturb their ability to create values and exchange it?

Customers that have funds available to purchase the services you offer and who are willing to actually spend that money are a hard requirement to maintain any business. If white collar and service industries are significantly disrupted by AI this necessarily reduces the number of potential customers. Thing is you don't have to lay off that many people to bankrupt half of the contractors in the country, a decent 3-5 year recession is all it takes. Folks stop spending on renovations and maintenance work when they're worried about their next paycheck.
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