[lxgr]

It's highly debatable whether, in case of an information sharing/gift economy, the concept of "bad actors coming in and ruining it for everybody by taking without giving back" even makes sense.

The information is still there, as is the community that you've built, the joy that you get out of sharing the information, everything you've learned...

Why is any of that diminished, just because some people or entities that you dislike also got something out of it?

[belorn]

I would take up that debate.

Attribution is seemingly a central part of a information sharing/gift economy, and especially in a information sharing/gift community. It is part of the trust that connects people and without it the community falls apart, and with that the economy. AI by its very nature removes attribution.

Accuracy of information is a second critical aspect of information sharing and communities that are built around it. Would Wikipedia as a community and resource work if some articles was just random words? If readers don't trust the site, and editors distrust each other, the community collapses and the value of the information is reduced. It might look like adding AI generated articles would not harm other existing articles, or the joy that editors of the past had in writing them, but the harm is what happen after the community get flooded by inaccurate information. Same goes for many other information sharing communities.

[lxgr]

Source trust and gift attribution are two distinct concepts, I'd say. One happens at the detriment to the taker (or "thief", if that even makes sense, as per my original comment); the other harms the original "producer".

For the former, it is already very much in any AI company's best interest to preserve attribution to become and remain credible.

For the latter, I can't help but wonder whether a gift economy that needs to diligently bookkeep attribution really is one, and if this is the only practicable way to implement one in a given larger society/economy, I'd say this says something important about that society as well.

[rpdillon]

I make very heavy use of sources that Gemini sites when I use it. I tend to use AI as sort of a mega search engine where I get a little bit of discussion, but if I care even a little bit about the topic, I end up reading the source material anyway.

[CaptainFever]

> AI by its very nature removes attribution.

This is incorrect. RAG preserves attribution. Training data doesn't, but it doesn't make sense to attribute that anyway, unless you want a list of every person who has ever lived.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

It's diminished because the hard reality is that you need money to live.

The end result of major tech companies sweeping in, taking everyone's creative work, outcompeting the originals with AI derivatives, and telling every artist on the planet "fuck off, send a job application to McDonalds" is significantly less art.

Copyright was invented to prevent exactly this scenario.

[lxgr]

Yes, which is why hackers and artists (at least those mainly publishing instead of mainly performing for a live audience) are ultimately not natural/inherent allies.

Hackers have usually drawn their funding from their (often lucrative) employment, which is what gave them the freedom to give away the products of their hacking for free.

One needs copyright to survive, the other see it as a means to enforce openness at best (those in favor of copyleft) and as an obstacle to their pursuit (owning the full system, liberating all aspects of and information about it) at worst.

This rift was always visible if you knew where to look, but AI is definitely wedging it wide open.

[achierius]

> whether ... the concept of "bad actors coming in and ruining it for everybody by taking without giving back" even makes sense.

This is pretty clearly answered by the GPL: yes, it does, and this concept has been around since the very beginning.

> The information is still there

True

> as is the community that you've built

Untrue. At this point it's well understood that AI is substitutionary for many of the services that would have once afforded people a way to monetize their production for the community. Without the ability to make a living by doing so, even a small one, people will be limited to doing only what they can in the little free time they get outside of work.

That's the whole problem -- that AI, as it exists today, is taking away from the public, and hurting it at the same time. That's closer to robbery than it is to "sharing in the community".

[johnnyanmac]

Yes. There's a difference between walking a trail and maybe littering a a few pieces of trash, and walking a trail while actively setting branches on fire.

One scenario is manageable to leave be, or perhaps one or two volunteers clean it up. The fires have an entire trail closed down to everyone.

With some FOSS projects being bombarded by scraping traffic, redoing their PR system, considering ways to limit contributiors, and even going closed source, I don't think such a metaphor is an exaggeration.