Technology

59534 readers

3195 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

The Internet Is About to Get Much Worse (www.nytimes.com)

submitted 1 year ago by JRepin@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.world

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5400607

This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals. The traditional example of this is a public field that cattle can graze upon. Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.

We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay.

But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As an open source contributor, I believe information (facts and techniques) should be free.

As an open source contributor, I also know that two-way collaboration only happens when users understand where the software came from and how they can communicate back to the original author(s).

The layer of obfuscation that LLMs add, where the code is really from XYZ open-source project, but appears to be manifesting from thin air... worries me, because it's going to alienate would-be collaborators from the original authors.

"AI" companies are not freeing information. They are colonizing it.

[–] Meowoem@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 year ago

My open source project benefits hugely from the free to access LLM coding tools available, that's a far bigger positive than the abstract fear that someone might feel alienated because the guy copy pasting their code doesn't know who he's copying from?

And yes, obviously the LLM isn't copying code it's leaning from a huge range of sources and combining it to make exactly what you ask for (well not exactly but with some needling it gets there eventually) but even if it were that's still not disrupting collaboration because that's not how collaboration works - no one says 'instead of coding all the boring elif statements required for my fiction determining if something is a prime, I'll search code snippits and collaborate with them' every worthwhile collaborator to my project has been an active user of the software and wanted to help improve it or add functions - AI won't change that, and if it does it'll only be because it makes coding so easy I don't need collaborators