I'm also not arguing that siloing is good, only that it's a rational reaction. Creators are uncomfortable having their work used that way and have to protect themselves against scrapers driving up their hosting costs. Other businesses quite reasonably want a share of all the money flowing around. People got tired of the wolves eating their sheep, so they built barns and fences and trained dogs.
If we want to stop the siloing, we need to address the what's causing people to resort to it.
Universities do it, Google search does it, broadcasters do it.
The only place that doesn't really do it is public libraries, which are all subsidized either by governments or donations.
Because agents can do labor this is more than just "knowledge sharing". It undercuts human labor power and allows for even grosser concentration of capital.
Just because AI companies have profit motives doesn’t mean it isn’t cool as heck that some poor kid with a burner Android phone can use a free ChatGPT account to learn about any topic they want.
If they're making a profit, it means they're providing a value to customers. In the case of LLM - the value is reducing the friction of accessing knowledge. The knowledge was there all along, but the friction of access too great to generate surplus value.
It is backwards thinking to propose that we are worse off by enabling access to knowledge.
But that's right, the side effect is that it reduced friction. The most benefit I get from LLMs when I treat them as search engines.
Like Alaric, Temujin, Teach, and Burham!
But now that it's individual creators that need protection suddenly copyright law needs to be reformed to serve the interests of large corporations once more. What a scam.
To put it visually:
selfless humans | corpo greed
|
enforce IP good ____|____ bad
violate IP better | bad