It does make sense. When podgietaru wrote their doo-dad programs, I guess they made their work available for humans to use and they didn't mind giving their work away for free. Some other person might say "I'm giving my work away free, I don't care if humans use it or AI, for any purpose". Both are legitimate choices, each according to their own.

As for "everyone benefiting from training data" - sure, but the AI companies are not investing Billions of dollars out of the goodness of their hearts, it is towards one and only singular goal of making profits (at some point). People might be sympathetic to these AI companies if they at least behave decently - they take everyone's work (text, software, fiction, music, images, videos...) without paying a penny to anyone. If they take everyone's work for free, they should give away anything that is built on that work also for free. This is before we even get to environment, privacy, hammering sites by not respecting robots.txt etc issues.

If I stole all veggies from your garden but spent time/money/effort making a meal, I should at minimum share it with you for free, no? Even if I spent my own money making the meal, it was made from stolen raw material...

I don't know how else to explain it. It doesn't feel the same to have my contributions smushed into a linear-algebra machine? For me, the incentive was the idea that my contributions might have directly helped someone. That absolutely does not feel the same when I think "My answer has modified the back propagation of a Machine Learning training run."

It doesn't have to make sense to you - I just believe that I'm not exactly alone in this thought.

Now apply this to Art, free stories, writing etc. It feels bad to have your free contributions hoovered up and monetized. It doesn't feel particularly fair or ethical to me. And it'd make me double think before making something free and publicly available.

> Now you can do something with your time besides writing pointless one-off doo-dads

Writing software one-offs to scratch an itch was historically one of my most enjoyable past-times. AI trivializing that has been a very real theft of joy in my life.

Solving the actual problem was never the point, it was just motivation to do geek-out and craft some code.

AI is rapidly diminishing many interesting hobbies (coding, art, music, writing).

Having more free time when there's nothing fun nor exciting to do with it isn't really a benefit.

This is such a sad worldview. Life without any challenges. Every problem immediately solved without learning anything.

| Now you can do something with your time besides writing pointless one-off doo-dads.

...thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators.

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