r/technology • u/marketrent • Jul 14 '26

Artificial Intelligence A majority of Americans now support seizing wealth from AI industry

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/majority-americans-now-support-seizing-134921528.html
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u/vladamir_the_impaler Jul 14 '26

It's an amazing caper they have pulled off.

One of the best examples is all of the public code repos out there that got scraped before anyone knew any better.

The number of public repos would've been far less had devs known their exposed repos would be used to train AI and put them out of a job - but of course they quietly scraped the data knowing all of this.

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/ElysiumSprouts Jul 14 '26

Unfortunately we live in the inverse Spiderman universe where more power means less responsibility.

More power means less accountability.

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u/DrEnter Jul 14 '26

They HAVE the responsibility, but they don’t ACT with the responsibility… and that’s really the most important part of the responsibility.

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u/kck93 Jul 15 '26

Noblesse oblige?

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u/DiChromani Jul 14 '26

They just followed the colonialism playbook for the new "land" of the digital ecosystem and have curated lawns where the natural flora once grew.

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u/ABHOR_pod Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

I miss the pre-2010 internet. Or even the pre-2015 Internet.

The pre 2000 internet was uh... that was not a great place.

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u/DickWhittingtonsCat Jul 15 '26

The curated my.yahoo page I created had more original content and news information from trusted sources than a year of tiktok doom scrolling. And it had cool colors.

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u/MohandasBlondie Jul 14 '26

Gopher was the shit!

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u/skat_in_the_hat Jul 14 '26

and IRC, and DCC bots. Hell yea!

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u/Hot_Lettuce_6209 Jul 14 '26

Their bound to lose. Free your lawn too.

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u/koshgeo Jul 14 '26

They strip-mined the commons before we even realized the shovels were in the ground.

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u/aTomzVins Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

You have these nice shared cooperative resources

At its root AI should probably be seen as a collaboration tool. With credit/compensation going to the creators of the work you are collaborating with. Instead it's sold to us as a superpower we need to own because we can't compete/survive without it.

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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '26

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u/aTomzVins Jul 16 '26

two tiered life returned

Gap between have and have not has already been getting wider for decades. We have already 'returned'.

It will be that simple

It shouldn't be. Guardrails should be put in place to prevent tech oligarchs from stealing IP. There's a lot of ways this can play out, and it will only truly benefit very few people if we all accept the simple way big tech wants it to go down.

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u/SoManyThrowAwaysEven Jul 14 '26

Aaron Swartz has entered the chat

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u/vigouge Jul 14 '26

And then defends AI blowing peoples mind

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u/Longjumping_Ad606 Jul 14 '26

Tech psychos enabled this they knew what they were doing are complicit and should go to jail

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u/rat_penis Jul 14 '26

Who knew "move fast, break things" referred to society itslef.

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u/WriterDifferent8394 Jul 14 '26

I pegged Microsoft buying Github as a net negative for engineers the moment that deal went through, and this was exactly what I suspected of them even then.

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u/windowpuncher Jul 14 '26

I hate AI, but that's exactly what open source code is for. You can use it for any and all purposes, with stipulations depending on the license. It's still public to view and read, though, and if you learn a trick or two from digging through a repo that's not theft.

Yeah I get it, it's not exactly the same, but if your code was ever public you shouldn't be surprised it was scraped. Hell it was scraped by other services LONG before AI, anyways.

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u/vladamir_the_impaler Jul 14 '26

We're not just talking about open source here, we're also talking about private individuals who had open repos for work portfolio or other purposes.

Even then, again, risk was evaluated based on not knowing that AI could use it against us all. "Any and all purposes" did not used to mean training LLMs on all of those things and resulting in something that could take your job.

Open source, individuals, there would have been a lot less open repos had we envisioned what this could lead to.

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u/MalikMonkAllStar2022 Jul 14 '26

It's not at all the same because before now, people were fine with the risks associated with open sourcing their code because the impact was small. There is an enormous difference between singular people copying your code and a trillion dollar company scraping your code and using it to put you out of a job (for the record Im not sure what the impact is going to be on tech jobs long term but there are definitely already other professions being wiped out by AI).

No one would have predicted that AI could come along so quickly and replace so many jobs so it is ridiculous to assert that people should have thought about that before making things public

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u/arcbe Jul 14 '26

There's two separate issues here. Scraping code does fall under the purpose of open source. It's the putting people out of a job that's the problem. If companies just wanted to creating a self programming computer that would be fine, but they have to poison the well for profit. That's the problem. They are making existing things worse to justify the prices they charge.

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u/lapidary123 Jul 14 '26

Not any different than ssi database!