[bayindirh]

The problem is not AI bot scraping, per se, but "AI bot scraping while disregarding all licenses and ethical considerations".

Freedom, the word, while implies no boundaries, is always bound by ethics, mutual respect and "do no harm" principle. The moment you trip either one of these wires and break them, the mechanisms to counter it becomes active.

Then we cry "but, freedom?!". Freedom also contains the consequences of one's actions.

Freedom without consequences is tyranny of the powerful.

[tliltocatl]

The problem isn't "AI bot scraping while disregarding all licenses and ethical considerations". The problem is "AI bot scraping while ignoring every good practice to reduce bandwidth usage".

[bayindirh]

If you ask me "every good practice to reduce bandwidth usage" falls under ethics pretty squarely, too.

While this is certainly a problem, it's not the only problem.

[wvenable]

> The problem is not AI bot scraping, per se, but "AI bot scraping while disregarding all licenses and ethical considerations".

What licenses? Free and open web. Go crazy. What ethical considerations? Do I police how users use the information on my site? No. If they make a pipe bomb using an 6502 CPU using code taken from my website -- am I supposed to do something about that?

[bayindirh]

Creative Commons, GFDL, Unlicense, GPL/AGPL, MIT, WTFPL. Go crazy. I have the freedom to police how users use the information on my site. Yes.

Real examples: My blog is BY-NC-SA and digital garden is GFDL. You can't take them, mangle and sell them. Especially, the blog.

AI companies take these posts, and sell derivatives, without any references, consent or compensation. BY-NC-SA is complete opposite of what they do.

This is why I'm not uploading any photos I take publicly anymore.

[wvenable]

Absolutely. If you want to put all kinds of copyright, license, and even payment restrictions on your content go ahead. And if AI companies or people abuse that, that's bad on them.

But I do think if you're serious about free and open information than why are you doing that in the first place? It's perfectly reasonable to be restrictive; I write both very open software and very closed software. But I see a lot of people want to straddle the line when it comes to AI without a rational argument.

[bayindirh]

Let me try to make my point as compact as possible. I may fail, but please bear with me.

I prefer Free Software to Open Source software. My license of choice is A/GPLv3+. Because, I don't want my work to be used by people/entities in a single sided way. The software I put out is the software I develop for myself, with the hope of being useful for somebody else. My digital garden is the same. My blog is a personal diary in the open. These are built on my free time, for myself, and shared.

See, permissive licenses are for "developer freedom". You can do whatever you do with what you can grab, as long as you write a line to credits. A/GPL family is different. Wants reciprocity. It empowers the user vs. the developer. You have to give the source. Who modifies the source, shares the modifications. It stays in the open. It has to stay open.

I demand this reciprocity for what I put out there. The licenses reflect that. It's "restricting the use to keep the information/code open". I share something I spent my time on, and I want it to live on the open, want a little respect for putting out what I did. That respect is not fame or superiority. Just not take it and run with it, keeping all the improvements to yourself.

It's not yours, but ours. You can't keep it to yourself.

When it comes to AI, it's an extension of this thinking. I do not give consent to a faceless corporation to close, twist and earn money from what I put out for public good. I don't want a set of corporations act as a middleman to get what I put out, repackage and corrupt it in the process and sell it. It's not about money; it's about ethics, doing the right thing and being respectful. It's about exploitation. Same is applicable to my photos.

I'm not against AI/LLM/Generative technology/etc. I'm against exploitation of people, artists, musicians, software developers, other companies. I equally get angry when a company's source available code is scraped and used for suggestions as well as an academic's LGPL high performance matrix library which is developed via grants over the years. This thing affect livelihoods of people.

I get angry when people say "if we take permission for what we do, AI industry will collapse", or "this thing just learns like humans, this is fair use".

I don't buy their "we're doing something awesome, we need no permission" attitude. No, you need permission to use my content. Because I say so. Read the fine print.

I don't want knowledge to be monopolized by these corporations. I don't want the small fish to be eaten by the bigger one and what remains is buried into the depths of information ocean.

This is why I stopped sharing my photos for now, and my latest research won't be open source for quite some time.

What I put out is for humans' direct consumption. Middlemen are not welcome.

If you have any questions or left any holes up there, please let me know.

[wvenable]

I respect the desire for reciprocity, but strong copyleft isn't the only, or even the best, way to protect user freedom or public knowledge. My opinion is that permissive licensing and open access to learn from public materials have created enormous value precisely because they don't pre-empt future uses. Requiring permission for every new kind of reuse (including ML training) shrinks the commons, entrenches incumbents who already have data deals, and reduces the impact of your work. The answer to exploitation is transparency, attribution, and guardrails against republication, not copyright enforced restrictions.

I used to be much more into the GPL than I am now. Perhaps it was much more necessary decades ago or perhaps our fears were misguided. I license all my own stuff as Apache. If companies want to use it, great. It doesn't diminish what I've done. But those who prefer GPL, I completely understand.

> as well as an academic's LGPL high performance matrix library which is developed via grants over the years.

The academic got paid with grants. So now this high performance library exists in the world, paid for by taxes, but it can't be used everywhere. Why is it bad to share this with everyone for any purpose?

> What I put out is for humans' direct consumption. Middlemen are not welcome.

Why? Why must it be direct consumption? I've use AI tools to accomplish things that I wouldn't be able to do on my own in my free time -- work that is now open source. Tons of developers this week are benefiting from what I was able to accomplish using a middle man. Not all middlemen, by definition, are bad. Middlemen can provide value. Why is that value not welcome?

> I'm not against AI/LLM/Generative technology/etc. I'm against exploitation of people, artists, musicians, software developers, other companies.

If you define AI/LLM/Generative technology/etc as the exploitation of exploitation of people, artists, musicians, software developers, other companies then you are against it. As software developers our work directly affects the livelihoods of people. Everything we create is meant to automate some human task. To be a software developer and then complain that AI is going to take away jobs is to be a hypocrite.

[tsimionescu]

Your whole argument is easily addressed by requiring the AI models to be open source. That way, they obviously respect the AGPL and any other open license, and contribute to the information being kept free. Letting these companies knowingly and obviously infringe licenses and all copyright as they do today is obviously immoral, and illegal.

[immibis]

AGPL doesn't pre-empt future uses or require permission for any kind of re-use. You just have to share alike. It's pretty simple.

AGPL lets you take a bunch of data and AI-train on it. You just have to release the data and source code to anyone who uses the model. Pretty simple. You don't have to rent them a bunch of GPUs.

Actually it can be annoying because of the specific mechanism by which you have to share alike - the program has to have a link to its own source code - you can't just offer the source alongside the binary. But it's doable.