Hetare King

Not every software company is a game developer, and even at home, not every programmer plays games on their PC that require a powerful GPU. If everyone working on, for example, business software all of a sudden needs a gaming PC that will be constantly running an AI model, that will greatly increase costs, both in terms of procurement of equipment and electricity. An increase in demand for powerful GPUs in fields that traditionally had no need for them isn’t exactly going to improve the hardware cost situation either. Whether you run the model locally or you leave it to a company, someone is going to have to pay the cost.

GPL may call itself “copyleft”, but legally it is dependent on copyright to be enforceable. In the first place, the whole point of licenses like GPL is to ensure that when people take from the commons, they also give back to the commons. The way AI gains its ability to generate shitty code undermines this, and so is ideologically very much at odds with Linux and the wider FOSS world.

It won’t exactly be able to accomplish anything like that if it’s been undermined no matter what the mechanism of its enforcement is.

The thing is, if all other things remain the same, an absence of copyright will also be used by the wealthy and powerful to further enrich and empower themselves and as a tool of oppression. From the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition: #34 War is good for business. #35 Peace is good for business. You cannot have internally consistent, principled view on copyright without also having a compatible view on the economy. And even then, the economy needs to come first; you cannot start destroying load-bearing pillars, no matter how ugly, without first getting everyone out of the house. The tool in itself can really be usefull when well used. Many people use it and get nice results. The way I see it, there are two kinds of people: those to whom AI is utterly useless because it just ends up taking more time and have them burn through their cognitive endurance faster, and those to whom it would be irresponsible to let them use it, because it would prevent them from finding better solutions for the busywork they’re letting the AI do, and they just end up creating a lot of needless maintenance overhead. But more importantly, being “useful” to certain individuals is not the same as being good for society. Which brings us back to it undermining licenses like the GPL, which would further enrich and empower the already advantaged. Also, I can’t find any example in history of a technology that was successfully banned despite being usefull. CFCs? Asbestos? The bans on them aren’t perfectly enforced, but nevertheless, the hole in the ozone layer is shrinking and the number of people dying of asbestos-related lung cancer is reducing, so they do have value. The strict “no-AI” movement has already lost its battle Even if it were true, that would be no reason to stop trying or to stop saying the truth: No matter useful you experience it as being, you are causing harm. To yourself, to the field, to society.

It’s probably not using any AI in any modern sense of the word, it’s just there for marketing purposes. What I’m guessing it really is, is more fancy sensors (temperature sensors in more locations, infrared sensors, moisture sensors), and multiple heating elements and/or fans that can be individually turned on and off, connected to a more complicated PID controller that is adjusted based on the selected dish. So it can do things like detect that the rear is hotter than the front and turn off the rear heating element, or detect if too much moisture is being released and turn down the temperature, but it’s ultimately the same kind of technology as any oven with a temperature knob uses. I rarely use my oven for anything other than pizza, bread and cookies, so it’s probably not very useful to me, but maybe it’s convenient if you do things like cooking a whole turkey or something?

Analogies are comparisons of structure, not intensity. There are a lot of things that are “not as bad” as child labour, that doesn’t make them OK. But i don’t believe in copyright laws either. Do you believe in the goals of the GPL? Because you have to admit, the way AI works, regardless of whether you frame it as “theft” or “copyright infringement” or not, is at odds with those goals.

You do realise that even if copyright were abolished, large, powerful corporations would continue to exist and even manage to use the absence of copyright to their advantage? Without the GPL being enforced, a company like Microsoft could finally start digging a moat around Linux without constraints.