this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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So making access to information free is helping scientific progress? Wow, who could have imagined that!
no no no you see, putting papers behind paywalls actually incentivizes innovation because... wait what?
Careful, lest the AI haters hear that.
Free papers = free access to information
LLMs = trash
The AI haters I've seen really hate free access to information. Well, there's apparently other kinds.
Very misguided.
ikr?
In your eyes, what are these AI haters complaining about?
To be clear, here is what I mean by rent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
Seems to be mainly about property owners not getting enough rent.
I'm not sure you have understood that people don't want to profit from their data, they want to avoid corporations stealing their private texts and pictures to train models they'll profit from.
Is this some weak attempt at gaslighting? If you want to make a career out of this, you really need to up your game. I mean, can you imagine some think tank going: Landlords don't want to profit from those apartments, they just want to avoid people squatting in them for free.
Your problem is that the landlord analogy just doesn't suit this situation.
Rent seeking is long-established economic jargon. It doesn't necessarily imply a landlord analogy. A landlord may not be extracting an economic rent within that definition.
The point is rent-seeking, not an analogy to landlords.
Precisely, and rent-seeking is what's not happening here, as nobody is looking to profit. People are only looking to keep their private information private.
Your gaslighting game is shit. Like Copyright lawsuits aren't half the news being cheered by AI haters. Not a single privacy lawsuit in sight. How stupid do you think people are?
Assuming you're right, it's still not rent-seeking. If I believe that AI companies should be made liable for breaking copyright, I'm not personally receiving any monetary benefit. Where's my rent?
It's about principle. It's unfair that a company can steal data and profit from it. Simple as that.
Yes, I'm sure very few AI haters will be getting any rent personally. They are supporting rent-seeking by others. I'm sure many do so out of "principle", or as it would be more commonly phrased, out of ideological dogmatism. I'm a left/liberal guy. I want a society that works for everybody.
A society that works for everybody is a fair society. Stealing intellectual property and user confidential data is not fair.
And some people will say that a fair society should give back to the King what those revolutionaries stole by creating republics everywhere. You think of your ideology as the one true definition of fairness, justice, and whatever. That's just ordinary dogmatism.
As far as I'm concerned, society should be ordered to fulfill everyone's material needs; food, shelter, health care, and such things. Otherwise, people should not be interfered with. They should be free to make the best of life. That is simply incompatible with rent-seeking.
I'm sure you'll be the first one to provide public access to your private photos and texts so everyone can check how to improve their lives with those valuable resources.
Amazing how propaganda by the rich is so successful in making people believe it's not them who are the parasites.
I draw some quiet satisfaction from feeling that I've had a positive influence on the world. I really don't understand why some are so outraged that they may have benefitted some stranger without payment.
Look... You believe society should pay money to property owners. Who owns most of the property? Rich people. You have your ideology but don't treat me like an idiot.
You put those words in my mouth, I never said I believe that. I've been saying that each person owns their data and have the right to decide what it can be used for.
It's a separate discussion but: that rich people own most of the assets has a lot to do with the fact they steal and use stolen resources to appropriate more resources. It's parasitic and needs to stop.
Fair enough, but that's a really fine point. You can do what you like with your property; use it, make it a gift, destroy it, give it to charity, ... But in daily life of most people, property rights are all about money.
Your ideas demand a massive amount of free money for the likes of Disney. On a societal level, that's basically it. I feel justified in ignoring a few people who have idiosyncratic plans.
ETA:
No. Wealth inequality is an unavoidable part of having property. I can find a simulation for you, if you want.
Inequality is fine as long as it isn't extreme. You can have limits on inequality by implementing rules. In my opinion it's about finding a balance where neither the richest nor the poorest person strays too far from the median, otherwise you start having trouble and move slowly towards an oligarchy that'll end in violence and suffering eventually.
Ok. And how would these rules fare against your convictions on property?
Which convictions on property?
You obviously have strong feelings on intellectual property. What actually are your views on that?
Not sure why you think that but I don't, I have strong feelings on personal privacy.
I believe you're constantly trying to steer the conversation into "you and everyone who opposes unethical AI model training only want data owners to get paid", but it's not how it is. I want to prevent AI corporations from stealing. It's a big difference.
Stealing is something you do with property. It's not something you do with privacy.
So what do you mean by "personal privacy"? Most would consider stuff intentionally made public to be explicitly not private. What actually is the problem?
AI companies are training models on photos and texts posted only for your friends to see in their networks, and worse, also on e-mails, personal images people are backing up, etc. That's private information. It shouldn't be used for training models.
With public information that everyone can see it's from my point of view a gray area. If a magazine takes a public photo and uses it to sell copies, they're stealing from the artist. But if they take that same photo and use it to train and sell an AI model, it's a difficult situation to assess. I think our best approach so far is to respect the author's wishes if they explicitly want to opt out. And yes of course I believe in intellectual property and copyright, if that was your question. They're there for a reason, and they not only benefit big corporations but also small and independent artists and content creators.
Can you give me an example or two of such a model?
Thanks for bringing us back there. That's the classical conservative argument. It's not wrong.
One thing you said earlier was: You can have limits on inequality by implementing rules.
So, how do such reforms stack up against your conservatism?
https://www.theverge.com/meta/694685/meta-ai-camera-roll
Just a recent example. Of course they're vague about what "public" means, but if you really believe they aren't using all the photos, you'd be pretty naive in my eyes.
If that's what you want to call conservative go ahead, although it's not what I'd typically associate with that word. Not sure where you see the problem? What does taxing wealth at increasing rates to decrease inequality have to do with enforcing intellectual property to protect intellectual workers?
Ok. You can't give an actual example, so you use emotional blackmail to discourage disagreement. Noted.
It's called Chesterton's fence.
To cut right to the chase. The problem is your intellectual dishonesty. First, it's privacy, then it's intellectual property, then privacy again. You try the spiel about sticking it to the corporations. When that is debunked, inequality is fine. Now it's about "intellectual workers", as if any of the higher-ups would share the loot.
You don't give a fuck about logic or reason. You're just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. You're working through a list of talking points without ever engaging your brain. A third world guy will do that for a dollar an hour.
And don't tell me that you're doing this for free. Doing free labor for billionaires so that billionaires can get some free money from the rest of us is the stupidest thing I ever heard of. Ahh. But I have heard of it.
Did you read the article? They're using your private photos from your camera roll. It is an actual example of what I said. The part I mentioned about public photos was of previously posted photos on Facebook. Please read the article otherwise don't ask for it.
Well, I'm replying to what you're asking and arguing about, as you can tell if you reread our thread. I care about both privacy and intellect property. Shouldn't be that hard to grasp. Also, you've just been asking questions and assuming my point of view without ever stating your own stance. Do you believe it's fine for AI companies to use your personal data and your intellect property to train models they'll profit from without your consent?
If you want to resort to ad hominem we can say good day and move on, that's not the point of discussing things here. At least not for me. If you'd like to answer my question about what is contradictory about enforcing wealth taxes and protecting IP at the same time, I'm all ears.
Hi there. I'm an artist who gives away everything for free because I don't personally think it's ethical to profit from pure human emotional expression. I also don't think it's ethical for some faceless corporation to profit from my art. I will ABSOLUTELY fight against my art being used to train AI models, but I have ABSOLUTELY no desire to profit. In fact, I have the opposite desire.
So tell me exactly what is rent-seeking?
So you're not seeking rent. Good on ya, because no small artist would be getting any appreciable amount of money. The big bucks go to Disney, Adobe, Getty, and the likes of them.
What am I supposed to do with the information you're giving me?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
I hope you don't believe people who are opposed to AI companies stealing data are also simultaneously rooting for big corporations such as the ones you mentioned. That would be a very misguided idea unfortunately.
Again, don't treat me like an idiot. Lemmy is full of threads where people cheer on big corporations like Disney when they go to court. I get that you only care about your ideology and not whether Disney, Adobe, or any other of them profits. But that's how it goes. Either you change your ideology or you accept what kind of world you are fighting for.
I'm on Lemmy everyday and haven't come across any thread where vast numbers of people are cheering for big companies in any capacity. Of course you'll probably have some who just want to stick it in the arse to AI companies and don't think two steps further, but I don't believe that's anywhere close to a significant number of people.