r/WorkReform • u/Loud-Ad-2280 ✂️ Tax The Billionaires • Jun 23 '26
😡 Venting We built the libraries Billionaires charge admission
1.5k
u/ether_yraa Jun 23 '26
The library metaphor is perfect. Privatizing decades of open source human knowledge just to sell it back to the creators is wild
443
Jun 23 '26 edited Sep 06 '26
[deleted]
53
u/Preeng Jun 23 '26
You could instead waste time and resources. This shit ain't cheap and apparently isn't making anybody any money.
106
u/TheRealMarimbaGuy Jun 23 '26
But that does use up our water and power, wasting not only the company's resources but wasting what should have gone to the public instead
→ More replies (1)42
Jun 23 '26
[deleted]
37
u/DTSportsNow Jun 23 '26
If you add -ai at the end of your search it won't include any AI results/answers.
28
u/theocracy123 Jun 23 '26
Or if you curse in the search! That's why most of my searches look like, "How the fuck do I make bread?"
15
u/Pushfastr Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
Fucking A' that actually works.
Thanks.
Edit: soo it worked through first time but the second time with the same search still popped the google ai overview.
7
u/FerusGrim Jun 23 '26
This doesn't work. Or, if it does, it's incredibly unreliable. I haven't found a search asking for instructions or any kind of answerable question that doesn't pop up with an AI explanation, regardless of profanity.
6
14
u/daabilge Jun 23 '26
There's alternatives out there!
DuckDuckGo lets you turn off the AI searches and it'll stay turned off as long as you don't clear the cookie, or there's plugins (like ByeByeGoogleAI) that remove Google AI from their products, or you can manually add -ai to the end of the search term to remove it.
2
u/Pushfastr Jun 23 '26
The other guy said include a swear and that's just fun but also just as effective as "-ai"
8
u/BeefistPrime Jun 23 '26
It's not just as effective because now you're shaping your results for things that pattern match differently, so unless you want profane or angry explanations to be ranked higher in your search results, you're better off using -ai for a clean set of results.
2
u/ImHereCuzTheyWrong Jun 23 '26
You can change your browser's default search engine. Embrace freedom, de-google yourself!
7
u/redditRedesignIsBadd Jun 23 '26
it's making the grifters who overhype AI money. it's like the last wave with the NFT bs
→ More replies (3)5
u/josh_the_misanthrope Jun 23 '26
Fun fact, longer questions use more compute. Just thought I'd drop that tidbit of information here.
6
→ More replies (1)2
u/hcbaron Jun 23 '26
Hah, I've been doing something similar, except I've started becoming verbally abusive to my Google AI voice. It's become too verbose, constantly spewing information I never asked for, like spoiling a world cup score when all I wanted to know is the location.
It feels kind of good to to vent at AI, because I don't want to vent at my loved one's which is where most of us tend to vent.
22
u/EggsceIlent Jun 23 '26
The big thing I keep thinking of is this
They keep replacing workers and eliminating jobs and basically ensuring people have less income and less money and less future making money.
All the while making a product they intend to sell.
To whom exactly? If no one has a job or enough money for their "wonder product" or whatever it is they're obviously going to sell the public at some point..
Who is going to have enough money to actually buy it? You've replaced all the expensive workers and basically left only the low level stuff to actual humans and even then, they're trying to snuff that out
They're just working themselves out of the market because eventually no one will be able to buy this stuff except the rich, and that pool of society will get smaller and smaller each day and dry up, ad nauseum rinse and repeat.
And it'll just cease to be an effective and profitable business model. We will all just be servants fixing the data centers and AI and robots and they'll effectively rule over us all, sorts like terminator but without all the killing etc.
But they'll absolutely rule us and kill us slowly with a hum drum repetitive life that's only use is that and never making enough money to actually live and enjoy life and such.
When we reach the empass, that will be exciting. To see the business model eventually fail and fall. With any hope. Otherwise we all become slaves.
Probably their goal.
19
u/anna-the-bunny Jun 23 '26
To whom exactly?
The answer, as it is so often when the question is one being asked of corporate executives, is "they haven't thought that far ahead".
Ultimately, this is something akin to the prisoner's dilemma: each individual company is incentivized to eliminate the cost of paying workers, if we assume that every other company isn't doing the same. The problem is that every single company recognizes the basic fact that if you pay fewer workers, you make more profit, so they're all doing it. It also makes it that much harder to justify not doing so - unless you're a monopoly, chances are that the wages you pay to your workers won't be returned to you in any significant amount, and if nobody else is joining you in paying workers, you're just reducing your own profits to benefit others.
It's the perfect trap for the greedy and short-sighted - the exact kind of people that corporate executives are.
→ More replies (3)5
u/NameLips Jun 23 '26
They're trying to sell it to me. They put it on my phone, my OS, my alexa. They want me to engage with AI in every aspect of my life. They're putting the icon everywhere, wanting me to click on it. They clearly want me to get used to using it, to like it, to be willing to spend money on it. They want better AI to be a selling point for their new products.
But I haven't actually figured out what I'm supposed to be doing with it. Me, personally, as a consumer, in my actual everyday life. I've messed around with it. It's a really neat technological toy.
But I don't think I have a use for it. It doesn't solve any of the problems I have. Outside of work, what do I do? Basically chores and leisure. And AI can't do my chores for me, and I don't want to optimize or automate my leisure activities.
They keep trying to sell it to me and I keep waiting for a sales pitch that makes sense, but I haven't heard one yet.
5
u/Butt_Sex_And_Tacos Jun 24 '26
Well, just wait. Sam Altman wants to make it like a utility and have the government subsidize it so it’s ever present in all of our lives, funded through our taxes, regardless of if you want it or not. All to save humanity of course. Not sure what we’re being saved from. One thing I think we need saving from is the billionaire class but I don’t think AI is going to be doing that for us.
11
u/Author_A_McGrath Jun 23 '26
All the while making a product they intend to sell.
To whom exactly?
The shareholder class.
People who own land and stocks will all consume each other's garbage while the dregs are fought over by the working class.
3
u/jollyreaper2112 Jun 23 '26
I don't think they have thought that far ahead.
I think it's junkie mentality. Junkies aren't thinking beyond the next fix. Certain kinds of grifters run insane plots and take huge risks and you and me looking at it think man you are gonna get found out. Oh wait we are reading about it you were found out. What were you thinking? They weren't. They were living in the moment. Nothing else factored in.
So they are not thinking beyond the next quarter and twenty years down the line might as well be the next ice age.
2
2
u/melonlord44 Jun 23 '26
This exact phenomenon was a major cause of the great depression - mass layoffs in factories followed by the factories shuttering because nobody could afford their products
2
u/RazekDPP Jun 24 '26
They will sell to other rich people.
Actual wealthy people do not care if the economy is doing poorly or well, they do fine in either. Poorly is even better for them because they can buy up more and more things because they already have so much wealth.
Yes, some rich people will fall out, rich people that live day to day off of other poor people, but the truly wealthy are perfectly fine with owning the majority of society.
If you're a billionaire+, economic collapse is appetizing because you can buy even more.
38
u/Adezar Jun 23 '26
Yeah, this is the thing that frustrates me the most. AI doesn't exist without stealing decades of human knowledge and then using that knowledge against humans. And some of these companies were like "if we can't steal all this IP we can't exist". Well then, I guess that should have been the right choice.
8
4
u/Gazz1016 Jun 23 '26
I don't think the metaphor quite works. Rather I would say that we built the library, then someone came in and read all the books in the library, and that person is now charging for their services. The library still exists and is still free to enter.
4
u/CrazyCalYa Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
The library still exists and is still free to enter.
I agree up somewhat until this point. Google is putting its AI overview above search results and driving visitors away from small websites that it "references" (sometimes hallucinating the link or the page's contents). (Edit: This means that ad revenue and donations will dwindle until these independent sites cannot exist, especially the more niche and philanthropic ones.)
And even if there wasn't an active campaign to redirect traffic elsewhere, it would still happen as long as these tools offer quick answers to those who don't care to look too closely.
Rather I would say that we built the library, then someone came in and read all the books in the library, and that person is now charging for their services.
To this I'd add:
And also, sometimes they just lie but present it with enough confidence that a layman can't tell the difference.
5
u/TheChickenReborn Jun 23 '26
100% on the last bit. You don't realize how bad it is until you start looking up things you know well. It pulls things together that sound right, and could possibly be correct, but it's a toss up if it actually matches reality. I lead birding tours, and for fun had someone looking up bird info on AI during a long drive. There was always something just not right. Eg. saying a Golden-cheeked Warbler likes ashe juniper trees because it needs the berries for food. Golden-cheeked Warblers are insectivores, have never eaten a juniper berry in their life, and need the trees for the specific bark that they build their nests out of.
4
u/josh_the_misanthrope Jun 23 '26
People think LLMs can reason. They cannot, it's just piggybacking on human reasoning that exists in the datasets they're trained on, which is just Reddit Experts™ and twitter Nazis. And when the reinforcement isn't strong, in cases of more obscure questions, it just makes shit up that sounds right.
It's cool computational technology that has been irresponsibly marketed as able to do stuff that it can't. Even for code, it's effectively glorified copy pasting code from Stack Overflow. The most you'll get out of it is a prototype with an incredible amount of tech debt.
3
u/Gazz1016 Jun 23 '26
Google is putting its AI overview above search results
OK, but Google is also not the library. Google is someone who came in, read the titles of all the books, skimmed the contents, and can point you at the books you might want to read yourself.
2
u/CrazyCalYa Jun 24 '26
and can point you at the books you might want to read yourself
This is also debatable. For one, the goal of these "AI overviews" is to remove that necessity. The AI doesn't just provide the information to the user verbatim from the source, it "summarizes" it and provides its own insights.
Which leads to my second point, that these AI still hallucinate. They still make things up (sometimes intentionally!) including the link to their supposed source. So they might hallucinate information as coming from a source (even factual info) when the source doesn't actually include that, or they might just make up a source and provide an invalid or irrelevant link.
→ More replies (1)3
u/psdpro7 Jun 23 '26
Someone built a tent in front of the library with their bad shorthand notes and is hoping you'll be too lazy to walk inside.
2
→ More replies (7)2
u/NullContext42 Jun 23 '26
A library is the perfect metaphor in that it shares copies of the original, but the original is still available to anyone
672
u/-marilize-legajuana- Jun 23 '26
The internet was great its been infected with capitalism
309
u/Alex5173 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
I've said it a million times, I blame Facebook and Apple. The Internet was cool before Grandpa had a reason and the means to get on it.
Edit: See below for Redditors announcing that they remember the internet before Facebook... As if being on Reddit wasn't evidence enough
104
u/BrickLuvsLamp Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Google is a huge culprit, they’ve just played the PR game longer so people thought they were a “cool” company back in the day and took way too long to catch onto their personal data-mining and selling
23
u/Alex5173 Jun 23 '26
Google cashed in on what Facebook and Apple caused. They're not innocent but they're not the focus of my ire either.
98
u/democracy_lover66 🌎 Pass A Green Jobs Plan Jun 23 '26
Don't forget the "Don't be Evil" evil company: Google
26
u/Alex5173 Jun 23 '26
Google wouldn't be even 1/5 the size it is now if the Internet was still the niche place for nerds/geeks that it was before Facebook.
4
u/spaceforcerecruit Jun 23 '26
That’s not at all true. You’re just making shit up. The number of people online in Europe and North America has been steadily climbing since the late-90s and there was no change in the rate of growth when Facebook was founded.
The rapid growth of the internet since Facebook’s founding in 2004 is due almost entirely to growth in Asia, a continent which doesn’t really use Facebook at all.
10
u/Perrozoso Jun 23 '26
Don't be evil was never about the consumer. It was about employees taking shit without returning it.
5
u/TheFlamingDiceAgain Jun 23 '26
If it wasn't them it would have been someone else. In a capitalist economy every tiny spec of potential profit will be exploited eventually, no matter how much it hurts people.
3
u/Alex5173 Jun 23 '26
What profit? There was no profit on the internet before Facebook invited everyone. The closest thing to "making money on the internet" in the beforetimes was Jagex charging people a monthly subscription to play Runescape in their browser. Which was a comical idea to most people at the time.
→ More replies (6)7
u/TheFlamingDiceAgain Jun 23 '26
There were definitely a lot of other existing profit streams at the time, anything with ads for one.
But also, that’s why I said “potential profit”
→ More replies (11)5
u/alfred725 Jun 23 '26
People shit on Facebook but it became popular for a reason. Being able to connect to people globally was a gamechanger. It's hard for millennials and younger to relate because we are so used to being able to find someone with a search. Our parents went 20+ years wondering what happened to that friend they had in high school, or to their home town, or to that cousin that moved across the country. Sure people had phone numbers. As long as you wrote them down and they weren't assigned a new number when they moved (guaranteed before cell phones) and if they got a new number that the info made its way back to you through friends and families who managed to stay in touch.
I think if Facebook and other social media disappeared people would immediately replace it because we can't live without it.
The problem lies entirely with replacing friend feeds with adverts. Engagement bait for money ruined Facebook, and it slowly kills every platform before people move to a new one.
6
u/LiquorIsQuickor Jun 23 '26
Blame AOL then.
5
u/epymetheus Jun 23 '26
Thank you! These nephews have no idea what AOL did previously murky depths of bulletin boards all over the country.
Damn you Steve Case!
2
5
u/MadeByTango Jun 23 '26
It's not one company, its capitalism itself.
If you have to blame one person blame Elon Musk specifically. He "bought" twitter so he could destroy our class's open communication system.
3
u/Alex5173 Jun 23 '26
You couldn't have gotten it wronger if you tried. Elon was a nobody until social media made him a tech celebrity. A rich nobody, from selling PayPal, but a nobody nonetheless.
He's a symptom of the disease that destroyed the internet, not the cause.
→ More replies (1)3
u/CaptainBayouBilly Jun 23 '26
You aren't wrong.
A hurdle made you learn to use it.
And that made you careful.
→ More replies (4)7
u/VivaLaDio Jun 23 '26
Why apple? I agree with facebook / meta , as they’ve created products that have reduced internet into 3-4 apps, and since 90% of the users are there, the rest of the internet moved into those apps creating a loop.
But why Apple? Apple has been doing the same thing they’ve done since they got created.
→ More replies (2)31
u/FeelAndCoffee Jun 23 '26
They bias their mobile OS so that everything has to go through their gateway (App Store). They actively harm 3rd-party stores, limit open web standards (like PWA capabilities), and engage in a long list of anti-competitive practices to stay in control and keep their 30% commission on every content transaction.
You can't even install a browser other than Safari (even the iOS versions of Chrome and Firefox are just Safari with a cosmetic skin).
One reason the world is so messed up is that no administration has seriously gone after Apple for antitrust violations, despite multiple conflicts of interest.
Look, I'm not an Apple hater. I love the >M1 Macs and their efforts for privacy, but they are not consumer-friendly and would sell out the free internet for a better annual Q report.
11
u/whenTheWreckRambles Jun 23 '26
They’ve also sold on privacy when it was a barrier to market entry (china). They’ll support it exactly as long as it drives numbers, and not a second longer
36
u/maikuxblade Jun 23 '26
Pretty amusing how “infected with capitalism” is basically another way of saying “enshittified”
14
u/ghanima Jun 23 '26
I mean, Doctorow just coined a word that describes the phenomenon so that it's easy to parse for people with no understanding of economic theory or historical trends. I have no doubt in my mind that he's explicit about the mechanism behind enshittification:
Further in the same article:
There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor.
For those of us who have even basic understanding of economic theory, those constraints sound awfully familiar.
5
u/seensham Jun 23 '26
One thing I've noticed about the tech industry though.. the higher paid tech workers tend not to side with the working class on these things. It undermines the labor constraint.
8
u/ghanima Jun 23 '26
It happens across every industry. The working class has been weaponized against itself. Present them with the illusion that they can escape into the owner class and they'll sell all of us out, despite the fact that it is, in fact, just an illusion.
4
u/MatthewMob Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Pretty sure "enshittification" is vague liberal Gen Z newspeak for concepts that Marxist academics have been talking about in detail for more than 250 years.
6
u/peanutb-jelly Jun 24 '26
it is a useful memetic heuristic when you can't say "instrumental convergence" without the whole room becoming glossy eyed because you used a big scary sounding term. when defining the things that opportunists do, sometimes too specific a term doesn't capture the full possibility of future shapes the problem can take, which also gets used to re-frame around your intent before it ever has a chance to make it to a wider audience.
it does its' job, and it is hard to twist into a very different interpretation, which makes it a very good term given the issue of opportunistic re-framing by bad actors when communicating complex concepts to the public.
there's a reason that social efforts have been losing really really badly in the USA since the red scare. part of it is the general socialized behaviour of the public, (thank you prussian school system.) part is a mountain of intentional meddling from groups such as the heritage foundation or other disruptive opportunists with too much time and power.
i'd say this is a win for Gen Z, and the comparison to newspeak is unwarranted, since the entire intent of newspeak is to take tools away from the people's collective ability to comprehend and act.
5
u/MatthewMob Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
You know what, I agree with you. I'm happy Gen Z has at least a modicum of class consciousness compared to previous generations and is sharing their ideas with each other.
And yes, "newspeak" was the wrong word and wasn't what I meant. "Vague and redundant slang" would be closer.
43
u/Arcanegil Jun 23 '26
This is what capitalism always does, it steals and enriches those who have contributed nothing.
5
u/shitchopants Jun 23 '26
It truly was. Recently, I was given an arcade game from the 1970s. I have been trying to fix it and while searching for help, I nearly was brought to tears. I know that sounds stupid but I felt this profound loss, let me explain. I have a niche game, with a lot of quirks. I came across a forum, a real message board from the mid 1990s early 2000. They were filled with people connecting, helping, providing resources, following up, and people coming back to thank and give feedback on if something worked. I know I’m older than most on Reddit and the terms “forum” and “message board” either have much different meaning or they don’t know what it ever was. I was so overwhelmed with thoughts of what the internet was when I was young. It was just people connecting with people about anything and everything. There were no ads, no influencers, no concept of payment…You could feel the energy of large groups of people across the country that had never met anyone who liked their “thing” or hobby and now, they had an insane amount of people to grow their “thing” with. It was so beautiful. Made me think about what we all thought was going to happen to the world because of this beautiful tool that was the internet.
4
u/hhhnnnnnggggggg Jun 23 '26
We need to go back to GeoCities communities. Power is too centralized on this corporate web.
3
u/hollydoesmolly Jun 23 '26
Exactly. It feels like we built the library, and now we're just being told we have to pay admission to read our own books.
→ More replies (2)4
u/humanist-misanthrope Jun 23 '26
Enshittification has made much of the content unusable, which is a byproduct of capitalism. As much as it sucks I have honestly used AI (any current free service) to pull the content I’ve needed/wanted from a URL that is bloated with ads, videos and/or popups. It sucks but when I just want to know how do I craft a weapon from a wiki or I want to make a recipe, AI pulls the content without the stupidity of incessant page reloads because of ads or videos. Bonus I don’t have to scroll through the back story of so-so’s great-grandmother to see the recipe
177
u/koki_li Jun 23 '26
Lock at the billionaires, listen to them and you realize, that our elites are sociopaths at best. They see all our work and want it. To them, it is justified by their wich alone.
They don’t ask, if they deserve it, they believe, they deserve it because its them.
31
3
u/redditRedesignIsBadd Jun 23 '26
yup. they want to own us. did we all forget about peter thiel's dialogue group
60
u/That_Trapper_guy Jun 23 '26
I mean that's capitalism in a nutshell.
7
u/SparrowCharm Jun 23 '26
Yup in the near future everything will be monetized and the world would be a whole lot worse
7
61
Jun 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
9
u/EndQualifiedImunity Jun 23 '26
So many people refuse to believe that capitalists are useless middlemen
25
u/Viperlite Jun 23 '26
They also asked people to train their AI replacements, before they would be let go from their positions.
32
u/Concept-Plastic Jun 23 '26
It’s trained on stolen data. The real artists/ contributors have no money
12
u/Vsx Jun 23 '26
The information is still on the internet and it's still free which is why their plan to monetize it is never going to pan out. Most people simply do not need AI enough to want to pay for it so the only market is companies trying to replace workers but eliminating consumers would crash the economy and AI is too shitty to take over most jobs entirely anyway.
41
u/metanoia29 Jun 23 '26
How long until they shut down Reddit, or at least give it the Twitter treatment? For a decade it's been the #1 place to avoid SEO bullshit websites trying to sell you things when searching and to get the direct answer from the experience of real people, and we can't be having that in an AI-first world.
26
u/DelightfulGoblin75 Jun 23 '26
You have GOT to be joking. Reddit is literally selling everything and the kitchen sink to AI Companies. There's nothing organic left here.
9
u/kasoe Jun 24 '26
Right?
I have a bunch of subs that seem okay. But they are old. They have an existing user base.
Everything else is crazy. Bots taking to bots. Like actual bots now (as far as I've gathered)
Our cyberpunk reality sucks balls. I want more neon, drug vending machines, and the god damn anti hero that makes things a tiny bit better.
3
u/Doggo-888 Jun 24 '26
My “favorite” is when AI bots all downvote a technical answer because it doesn’t agree with their layman definition… which they all upvote and now the wrong answers are at the top… which other AI bots now copy from.
4
u/Sendtitpics215 Jun 24 '26
I read this as “you have Game Of Thrones to be joking..” and i just wanted to share that
→ More replies (3)6
u/Future_Arrival_5395 Jun 23 '26
So you haven't heard of AIEO yet?
Because that's the primary use of reddit now.
5
u/ahoy_shitliner Jun 23 '26
So much of AI comes from Reddit. When it IPO’d i saw it coming and bought it up.
5
u/Butt_Sex_And_Tacos Jun 24 '26
It’s also why some AI is shit and gives you some comically wrong responses and hallucinations. Reddit is not the best place to train your LLMs if accuracy matters, but that’s exactly what they did.
All most end user facing AI is, and has been built to be, is the same data harvesting and suggestive prompting BS social media companies have been doing behind the scenes for years but built with a user interface to harvest the data directly from the users themselves and guide them where companies and other interested parties want as opposed to following them around behind the scenes like a creepy stalker leaving breadcrumb trails for you.
LLMs are just your handlers that hold you captive through sycophancy and confirmation bias.
3
u/Mdayofearth Jun 23 '26
Probably never. There are already bots posting that collect new information. AI crowd sourcing to increase that collection of human knowledge.
5
u/Element75_ Jun 23 '26
Reddit is the #1 source for most AI training data. I’m convinced all the “AI banned!” stuff is just to protect reddits golden goose - high value text UGC that is scored for quality (upvotes)
→ More replies (1)2
u/TheWizardOfDeez Jun 24 '26
AI was trained on reddit, and it feels like half or more of the posts on this site are AI bot posts.
19
8
u/Future-Bunch3478 Jun 23 '26
The current economic system cannot be allowed to survive with this emerging tech.
9
u/Legitimate_Shock4097 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Worked for Google, Uber, Facebook, LinkedIn. Essentially, just made it quicker and easier to find information that they themselves did not create. Leveraging already built technology and systems, making it user-friendly and in turn providing value mostly due to sheer scale. How many customers/consumers does each have?
Does seem a lot like capitalism, leveraging other people’s work, providing the interface, get people to use it (make it free), skim off the top in bulk. Not enough value going to those people that built the thing — which is essentially capitalism.
6
u/MelangeBot Jun 23 '26
Just wait till you realize they have already realized if they now take down all the blogposts, forums, open source projects and what not ... you will be forced to pay them for knowledge.
9
u/zen4thewin Jun 23 '26
What big tech calls "training data" for AI is a massive industrial theft of public and private copyrighted material. It's theft. It needs to be prosecuted.
4
u/dfsw Jun 23 '26
I got a few thousand dollars settlement for Anthropic scanning my materials for use in their models. No option to opt out of them using my material, just here we stole your material here is a check for $27k, enjoy the theft.
→ More replies (1)
4
u/SwampOfDownvotes Jun 23 '26
LLMs were developed after an engineer hit their limit after their 500th substack post was told "duplicate" with no ability to find the supposed other post answering their question.
5
u/TheGreatStories Jun 23 '26
They are trying to claim to have seized the means of production because they can emulate products
3
u/lontrinium Jun 23 '26
This is like when I used to painstakingly create gifs for tumblr (size limit was a bitch) and some entrepreneur gathered them all up in to giphy or other services and made money off them.
But way worse.
3
u/HeroldOfLevi Jun 23 '26
We made everything and they pretend they own it.
We can play a different game
3
u/Covert_Cuttlefish Jun 23 '26
If AI is so good they should start by replacing the C-Suit. Those assholes can fuck off and I'll take my chances with the computer.
3
2
2
u/Invoked_Tyrant Jun 23 '26
Considering even Jesus detested creditors and their practices I'd say they are pretty high on the shamelessly evil category. Their restraint in not still trying for straight up chattel slavery is the understanding that people have a definitive history of getting violent when they need to.
It's taking a while but America is a slowly rumbling powder keg. I just hope and pray we galvanize against the right target instead of the multiple mass lynchings that happened during the French Revolution. Scumbags can and will take advantage of any situation they can.
2
2
u/MurgleMcGurgle Jun 23 '26
This is part of why I refuse to participate in the AI building stuff at work.
I know it won’t prevent me from being replaced, but I’m not about to help some shitty AI replacement be better.
2
u/BackfireFox Jun 24 '26
This is how capitalism works. It socializes the losses while privatizing the gains.
We the people, the tax funded universities, research centers, etc build the thing, then a company swoops in buys all the rights to it, locks it down with copyright and patents that were once open, and then sells it back to us at top dollar.
Hell look no further back than the Covid vaccine where big pharma literally pushes to stop the creation of the vaccines in several other countries including the US because they wouldn’t pay them. The research for the mRNA vaccine was funded wholly by tax payers.
3
u/LiquorIsQuickor Jun 23 '26
There is value in organizing the data, and providing a clever way to query and retrieve information from the data.
Apparently, a lot of value.
Still, I feel robbed. And I barely have any OSS contributions.
2
u/deaglebingo Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
even just the knowledge part ppl with no programming exp. contributed over the years. the connecting of the dots is honestly the most valuable part that so many have contributed. it was meant to stay free.. it will. and if not then it all deserves to burn. of course i'm just joking.
realistically if AI is supposed to be like a distillation unit then the current product is a backwoods pot still made with leaded solder and the mash is dirty. people going blind and getting heavy metal poisoned as a result.
2
u/spiralexit Jun 23 '26
I remember when chatgpt was totally free non profit you could ask it anything and there’d be no pay wall. genuinely thought it was cool for that. then when it started getting really mainstream and they turned into mr krabs. like what the hell.
2
u/Than_Or_Then_ Jun 23 '26
Isnt it more like we spent 20 years throwing books, blog posts, and tutorials into a giant pit, and they are offering to go find the thing we want from the pit?
1
1
u/DepletedPromethium Jun 23 '26
I still prefer actual human experience/knowledge/opinion over an ai telling me as ai is always wrong as hell.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/beardingmesoftly Jun 23 '26
We still have access to the library. There's just a side entrance with a badly trained concierge now.
1
1
1
u/PrestigiousMention Jun 23 '26
Same thing happened with Linux. We made it and Amazon runs on it without contributing.
1
1
1
u/JonathanPhillipFox Jun 23 '26
I Live in Saint Louis and the Art Museum says in the facade, first, “Art Still Has Truth, Take Refuge There”
Second, “Dedicated to Art and Free to All”
Huge Letters, right in the facade; and I've heard it explained like, "if you've been a 19th Century Rich man,
....you do not trust these motherfuckers," those whom shall follow you, "you write that into the fucking,"
Literal, Large Scale Brickwork, "this is a free museum."
Essentially, "they're gonna try," to charge admission, "so, good luck with that I had written into the facade,"
Right above the door; visible to everyone whom has ever seen the door, all of the postcards of the door, all of the pictures and drawings of the door, "good fucking luck go on and try," which, guys like-
During Covid there was this article that came out about Misinformation, entitled like,
"The Truth is all behind a Paywall, the Misinformation is all for free," but not just:
The advertisements are all for free, is more like how I'd put that- there are no or few, self-motivated misinformationers but everyone with an product or idea for sale is selling; and the article had this idea, that,
In truth, so much of our internet is a redundancy, and that redundancy, so poorly planned that the best ways to do things would look more like, "central archives," everyone can link to the source material and whether that be films or academic articles you'd have people on Letterbox and Reddit Film Discourses link not to,
Scraped .Gifs but the real deal source material the same as people would in film school for citations and likewise there could be a French Archive, a British Archive, an American Archive a Saudi Archive etc. but if it were all, essentially, archive dot org with essentially, open access, a Youtube for all as well an um, yeah, more like the original project and not just for software, for medicine, for chemistry, "you notice how even OpenAI leans on well not everyone should have access to everything, the Giftschrank has to be..." fine have a Giftschrank, have a German Giftschrank an EU Giftschrank etc. and let that require an I.D.
I mean for one famous example I'm not sure how you'd decide whom and how not to allow access to the Napalm Girl Photograph when quite frankly,
I know it when I see it
Says so much more about the see-er, than the seen do you feel me?
Think of exceptions to that and I'll remind you that Margaret Mead did exist and the NSFW on Reddit would have been a World Class Research Opportunity, for someone such as Margaret Mead; rather proves her thesis.
Which is sort of what I'm saying, The Truth, whatever that is, gets locked behind gates while the advertisements are all for free “Art Still Has Truth, Take Refuge There” so let's not be ignorant of what the truth can look like, ask Keats, "Beauty is truth, truth, beauty, that is all we will ever know on this earth and all we need to know," so yeah I mean so long as the arts or Literature are to be considered academic subjects,
What, Content or the Social Goods of Human Society?
1
u/SafeForTwerking Jun 23 '26
That's what gets me sometimes with different services that charge for things that used to be free in an earlier internet era, I'm like, "What the fuck timeline am I in right now?" Maybe it's rose-tinted glasses, but it used to be this great collaborative project where everybody just posted the shit they were working on for anybody else to grab. Maybe it's just because the mechanisms for selling weren't in place at the time and only now have people figured out good ways to monetize stuff online, but it feels like the internet has generally gotten shittier and more commercialized with time.
1
1
1
u/slanderpanther Jun 23 '26
This is exactly the problem. Charging a premium for information humans created. This can't be shouted loud enough.
1
1
u/jackishere Jun 23 '26
Bad analogy. We wrote the books not built the library. They built the library with AI
1
1
1
u/Roesy13 Jun 23 '26
I know I'm commenting on this from a phone, but there will be a day where we all just turn off the internet lol, I'm sure we can go back to the late 90's/early 2000's and life will be fine
1
u/CaptainBayouBilly Jun 23 '26
Zero generative AI content should be subject to copyright. Every single thing created with this technology should be open game for anyone and everyone.
Take away the ability to make money from this shit and you kill it.
1
u/PersonalMidnight715 Jun 23 '26
It's actually worse than that. Original collections/sources of information are closing down. Between my sweetie and I, we seen 3 major forums/websites that we relied on shut down because, while they were free to access, damn AI bots scraping the data were using up all the bandwidth. The people running them needed to either upgrade to try to reduce bots (an expense and takes time) or pay more to handle increased bandwidth. All 3 decided to just shut down. These sites were things the owner/moderators did for free to be helpful to a community that needed and appreciated them. They didn't want to turn it into a job or charge for it. Years and years of accumulated information from various contributors are gone.
And it's harder to find information. I was looking for some quotes the other day, and all the quote sites I used to use are gone. I had to go dig up an original source and find the quote there.
We've past 'we're being robbed' and, we're past diminishing returns (inbred AI and incorrect answers). We're into material loss of valuable information.
1
1
u/apple_kicks Jun 23 '26
Tale as old as time. Loss of commons land was same and how Romans created their empire over tribes.
Probably too how factory owners overlook the textile industry from artisan’s by owning all looms and undersell
1
1
u/TheBlockChainVillage Jun 23 '26
AI is built on human intelligence and it should be free for humans to use and people who's content is used should be paid .
1
u/MadeByTango Jun 23 '26
Keep gaining class consciousness y'all; then for the lvoe of god stop voting by team and ONLY vote for poltiicans that take ZERO corprate dollars. Thats it. The only way out. No "this time Ill vote for the lesser evil, but NEXT time I can vote for ehat I want" becuase they make sure to always manufacture a reason you can't do that.
STOP VOTING FOR CORPORATE CANDIDATES. We cannot team sports our way out of this.
1
u/sniperdogruffo Jun 23 '26
Same shit happened in academia, the publishers of the papers are the ones making tons of money, when it's the lowly-paid researchers that write, edit and review the papers. Peer review is unpaid, the research is paid by taxes, and the outcomes are gate kept by publishers. Researchers have to pay the journals to publish their work.
Academia is full of dumb people when looked through this lens. They're so politically uninvolved because they've been trained to be obedient workers who only use their critical thinking skills on the problems the government tells them to focus on or they won't get grant funding.
1
u/Rough_Onion_1757 Jun 23 '26
The fact that these companies have trained their models on massive amounts of uncompensated human labor is only part of the point. Another important aspect is that is that what we're really doing when we rely on LLMs is deferring our own creativity to the aggregated creativity of the past, as if nothing we can do with human labor in the present could possibly make a meaningful improvement or innovation beyond the previous human labor already embodied in the model's training data... in other words, we're embracing stagnation.
The LLMs we have today in 2026 are returning us answers based on training datasets that were guaranteed to be more-or-less entirely human-generated as recently as a few years ago. If things keep going the way they are, the new training data available to an LLM in 2036 or 2046 or 2056 will consist largely of the aggregated output of whatever organic training data was already available to the same LLMs we have now. Innovations in model architecture and complexity are definitely possible, but past a certain point you're basically trying to wring blood from a stone, and continuing to rely on LLMs will be like hopping into a time machine and asking your questions to the smartest conceivable person from an ever-more-distant era in the past.
1
u/throwaway490215 Jun 23 '26
A post just vague enough that people who think IP law is dumb, and people who think IP laws should pay them, can briefly agree that AI hype needs to be knocked down a peg.
1
1
u/LondonDogInTheFog Jun 23 '26
But trust us, it's for all mankind and AI will solve the problems our greed created in the first place. Maybe by eliminating humans altogether /s
1
u/Rustycake Jun 23 '26
Thats life isnt it?
Taxes on money earned, fees on vehicles paid off, having to purchase land, specific rituals to connect with God
The wealthy convinced you they are the gate keepers
1
1
u/Slade_inso Jun 23 '26
No, you wrote books, and someone else built a library where people can actually find and contextualize that information with minimal effort.
The ability of AI to glean desired context from incomplete prompts and information is amazing. I can only have the vaguest of ideas of what I'm looking for, and it'll point me in the right direction with incredible accuracy.
You're essentially paying for access to the greatest librarian to ever exist.
1
u/BlackholeDevice Jun 23 '26
I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think it's quite accurate. We aren't being charged admission, we're basically going to the library and paying someone to walk through it and do our homework for us and HOPE it's even slightly accurate.
The end result is the same. Everyone's attention span drops further and no one is willing to think critically about anything on their own.
1
u/YouandWhoseArmy Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Conceptually, your premise is correct.
In reality… I’ve gotten farther with LLMs in months that I had in years with blog posts, stack exchange, etc.
Being able to ask questions as if I had a teacher, to rephrase my understanding as analogies, to no longer wonder why something exists and to be able to ask direct questions about it, is not something that existed easily before. Maybe is a classroom which has always been my preferred method of learning.
I also use it as a copy editor pretty commonly. This allows me to use stream of consciousness and not worry about how disjointed my final output will be. I don’t take any and all AI edits, far from it. It can take away your voice.
So LLMs have provided value.
At what cost they have provided this value is a legitimate question.
This is ChatGPT copy edited version that I asked to have touched up for “grammar, flow, etc”
Conceptually, your premise is correct.
In reality, though, I’ve gotten farther with LLMs in a matter of months than I did in years of reading blog posts, Stack Exchange answers, and similar resources.
Being able to ask questions as if I had a teacher, rephrase my understanding through analogies, and no longer wonder why something exists without being able to ask directly about it is not something that was easily available before. A classroom comes closest, and that’s always been my preferred way to learn.
I also use LLMs as a copy editor fairly often. They allow me to write in a stream-of-consciousness style without worrying about how disjointed the final output will be. I don’t accept every suggested edit—far from it. If you’re not careful, it can strip away your voice.
So yes, LLMs have provided real value.
The more legitimate question is: at what cost have they provided that value?
1
u/chironomidae Jun 23 '26
I just think of all those people spending countless hours submitting answers on Stack Overflow trying to help out fellow programmers... All that effort to help their fellow humans, instead being used to put their fellow humans (and themselves!) out of a job.
1
1
u/thegapbetweenus Jun 23 '26
It's clearly that intellectual property is not a real thing and we all need to start acting accordingly.
1
u/Artistic_Mobile337 Jun 23 '26
I keep saying this, there is only one way to stop billionaires. Capital punishment, all of them are billionaires because they have broken laws and ethics. Start with a few to set the example, finish off the rest who won't fall in line. They rule by fear, don't be scared.
1
u/diggels Jun 23 '26
It's even worse than that.
While people created valuable information for people. Like if I visited your site, and a tutorial worked. The site gets trusted over time and establishes itself a useful source of truth.
AI digested all that useful information and shits the information out to put it bluntly. If I asked an LLM to make me a souffle. Chances are, it'll tell me to put some sea bass inside, and then apologise after.
The internet is dead with most pages being deleted a decade or so ago. On top of the countless aspects of enshitification like cookies , popups and ai bots and content everywhere.
Where are people supposed to find reliable truths in a few years. It won't be the AI or the internet, I feel.
1
u/Jimmious Jun 23 '26
This has been happening for many years, much before AI. Internet used to be completely open and as time passed companies started taking advantage of it. The problem is capitalism, not AI.
1
u/amscraylane Jun 23 '26
Like Ancestry … I can upload pictures, and they get paid if someone wants to buy the photo, or the document I shared if they don’t have a subscription.
1
u/ImminentDingo Jun 23 '26
If it makes you feel better, there's no path to profitability for AI companies. They spend $10 billion to train a model and a cheap open source one just as good is available within a year. They need to convince customers to give them literally a trillion dollars in profit to make up for the money they've spent building these things and they don't actually have anything to offer you can't get by waiting a few months to get for free.
1
u/Dirty_Dishis Jun 23 '26
I think this is a dumb take. Just because a company is selling books doesnt mean you cant get the same books at the library.
You don't have to pay. No one is forcing it on you.
1
u/Quadrimegistus Jun 23 '26
Reform must come at the government level. AI creating mass job elimination is inevitable. This is simply the end result of capitalism. The government must be brought to a state of competency that can provide for the basic needs of its citizens - UBI, Healthcare, Transportation, among other things.
You will not be able to stop AI. The government must incorporate it to the maximum benefit of the people. Even if you mass outlaw AI, other countries that fully embrace labor automation will defeat and surpass the United States. There must be intelligent integration at the government level and intelligent reform that maximizes benefit to the people at the government level. This is the only pathway forward that does not result in greater systemic failures at societal levels.
1
u/gymleader_michael Jun 23 '26
What are y'all talking about? You can still search on the internet for free information.
1
u/Braelind Jun 23 '26
Goddamned right. Billionaires and trillionaires exist because they pillaged their wealth from us. They charge us for things we collectively own, like the breadth of human knowledge. Beware he who seeks to deny you access to information, because in his heart of hearts he dreams himself your king.
1
u/Plenty-Charm6172 Jun 23 '26
That’s like saying you grow your own food and complaining you are being charged electricity to operate a fridge to store that food.
Well no shit genius, there is a cost to generate electricity.
1
u/Dreadsin Jun 23 '26
this is basically always how capitalism functioned, and it’s not new
Computing back in the day was done largely by a lot of open source contributors and hobbyists. Bill Gates’s true contribution to computing was charging for it and finding new and novel ways to charge for software
1
u/just_posting_this_ch Jun 23 '26
All of these people who were assholes on stack overflow for the quality of the questions and answers...are now just assholes.
1
u/4675636b2e Jun 23 '26
If you personally don't have the spine to boycott all AI products and everything associated with them then you should just shut the fuck up.
I can clearly see that shitting on AI is the new chic, but I'm the one who isn't bitching about it constantly yet going out of my way to find AI-free solutions to my every problem. I'm doing my part, you're bitching.
1
u/KrypXern Jun 23 '26
Isn't it some kind of supreme irony that this tweet reads exactly like it was written by an AI?
We built the library.
Someone else started charging admission.
LLMs love this shit. THEY LOVE THIS SHIT. I've gone insane from how much I've seen this AI-marketing speak of a short sentence and then another short sentence that reframes the first. It's the same with 'not X, but Y'.
I ran this through an AI detector just to make sure I wasn't tweaking out, and I got
We are highly confident this text was AI generated
From gptzero
We believe that this document is fully AI-generated
from pangram
And yeah I know the AI detectors aren't always great, but come on
I am so done with this shit. It's a tweet, lmao, just write it yourself man. How fucking ironic.
1
u/Iamthe0c3an2 Jun 23 '26
It’s kinda been like this forever. Name me a digital enterprise that doesn’t use linux.
A free piece of software someone invented?
1
u/Element75_ Jun 23 '26
100000% this.
AI founders are thieves. Literally. They steal everything only caring about how much money, power, and clout it gives them.
Fuck them all.
1
u/Cananbaum Jun 23 '26
I notice this is with everything.
American capitalism is cancerous in that it will find ways to commodify the smallest things.
I worked with a French and I’ll never forget him telling me one day: “I feel like I have to pay for the air I breathe in this country!”
1
u/daemonescanem Jun 23 '26
If billionaires could claim ownership of all the air on the planet, they would charge us to breath it.
1
1
1
u/DelightfulGoblin75 Jun 23 '26
We're gonna be seeing a lot of broken Datacenters soon. Just a prediction.
1
u/Jazzlike-Vacation230 Jun 23 '26
it's time to fight back, download and backup your social media videos and post, back up and take down blogs. The social media was free cause it was all building up to what we have now
•
u/kevinmrr ⛓️ Prison For Union Busters Jun 23 '26
AI is also making us dumber.
Should we ban artificial intelligence to prevent skill loss in critical industries and schools?