I've been on the free information train my entire life, back to my little hacker punk days in the 90's, so my opinion on that isn't worth much. I do think that the ecological considerations are also entirely the fault of the aforementioned CEOs. Machine learning research has been ongoing in good faith since the 40's. Blaming the technology is kind of silly. Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons were assholes in the 1830's.

This technology is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM. The robber barons and monopolists tend to come out of the woodwork when incredible technologies emerge. It just sucks that we still haven't evolved them out of society.

The ecological considerations are wildly overstated. Data centres in general != AI, and other industries, including meat production and (ironically) paper for print all use far more water and create more damage.

This might change in the future if the planned insanely huge data centres get built and used. But today the situation is clear - AI isn't any more ecologically damaging than other popular data centred activities like streaming music and video, and general social media.

The IP considerations, environmental considerations, "lol we're gonna destroy the world and get you laid off" considerations, and of course the big middle finger given to artists of all types, from authors to musicians... They painted themselves as villains and then they were shocked when people viewed them as such.

“You wouldn’t download a car” is making an unexpected comeback after all these years

but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft

Two thoughts:

A. That's only true (to any extent) if you hold the extremely myopic view that 'AI == Generative AI'. For my part I'd posit that "AI" at large is not "intrinsically born out of theft". Not unless you think that linear regression, or a genetic algorithm, etc., inherently involve theft somehow.

B. It's an open question whether or not copyright infringement should be considered "theft" at all. It's curious though, that historically hacker oriented communities tended to lean towards "No" being the answer to that. But the scale at which GenAI affects things may be the reason that sentiment seems to be shifting a bit?

Everything you said plus now these out-of-touch and incredibly rich CEOs are shoving it in our faces that they are determined to take away our income while pocketing even more riches.

I (and I assume many others on especially HN) don't consider intellectual "property" as real so there is no "theft" in our minds, so this argument doesn't bear much weight.

> I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.

I also hate it because:

1) Fundamentally, it's about reducing the power of labor (which are what the vast majority of people are) and I know I'm a laborer. This is why the CEOs and wealthy are excited about it.

2) It's about automating the engaging and creative knowledge work, and leaving the humans with manual labor and drudgery.

It's numerous. CEO's lying, ceo-ceo marketing - fire your employees and use AI, environmental impact, social impact, memory/chip shortages, theft of information which has placed a massive burden on site operators assaulted by scraper traffic. I'm sure I'm missing a few but the negatives are real but so long as people get to feel like 10x engineers, it's fine.

Personally, I find AI technology itself super interesting. Plenty of great use cases. However, The current crop of lying thieving assholes running the show make it repulsive.

Piracy is not theft. If something can be copied infinite times without any effort with broad societal benefit, then it's a moral imperative to do so. The opposite is gatekeeping in the name of monopolistic profiteering and the wealth concentration that the modern broken IP law enforces.

Besides, Anthropic did allegedly buy the ebooks they trained on so it's not like they even did that. It goes both ways though, they should get comfortable with their models getting distilled and opened up for everyone to run however they want. LLMs trained on people's data belong to the people.

Don't even get me started on the socioeconomic considerations!

AGI is a savior figure for the capitalist class. A tech version of the Second Coming, delivering them from the pesky demands of workers, like a living wage or (gasp!) sick leave.

That's why they're all so obsessed with it, it has religious-ideological component to them. When you hear them talk about AGI, there's always this weird eschatological vibe with it.

Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further. Even if their cyberjesus comes down to them through the machine and replaces all workers, who's gonna buy all their stuff then?

All they're doing in their capitalist zealotry is ringing in the end of capitalism.