Money people are very clever and extremely rational, which is why the only companies whose share values aren't falling through the floor are the ones who have made enormous losses for the entire time that they've been doing what they're doing. This is cool and normal and if you think otherwise you're just not smart enough to understand the importance of Number Go Up.
Oh, anyone reading this thread as result of @pluralistic boosting my quote toot would probably also appreciate this. Excellent (albeit depressing) analysis of AI as an enclosure movement for the information commons: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27251
The author focuses on academia, and science in particular, presumably because that is their field but I think their argument is more generally applicable.
The techbros are trying to mechanise all intellectual, creative or cultural endeavours. The end goal is for anyone trying to do any form of STEAM to have no choice but to use their machines to do it, and pay rent to the machine owning landlords in the process. The corrosive effect that AI is already having on formal education, and the destruction of the internet as a useful source of information due to the combined effects of slop pollution and useless chatbot mediated search play directly into this.
Other casualties to the AI cause include personal computing, though techbros have been working towards stamping that out for a lot longer than LLM have been around. If ordinary people have their own computer devices and the ability to make them do what they want that's a threat to the tech overlords. The manufactured GPU, RAM and storage shortages ensure general purpose computers will be hard to get and prohibitively expensive, while the phones and tablets sold by the tech giants are ever more locked down, constantly pushing AI, and totally dependent on cloud services.
A decline in the ability of the general population to do computery things by themselves is great news for the people who are in the business of selling a substitute by the token.
TL;DR: the ultra-capitalists are seizing the means of intellectual/creative/cultural production.
This fits well in this thread. I mentioned earlier "The corrosive effect that AI is already having on formal education" and this article lays it out in detail, along with the prior damage caused by managerialism and neoliberalism.
@spacelizard @pluralistic No one owns Elsevier? Wiley? Taylor & Francis?
@Hammerwell Read the article.
@spacelizard Thats the Thing. You set two things equal as a precondition in the discussion (The scientific literature can be viewed as an “information commons:”). However, those can be equal but not neccecarily. At least for a very big part. How big this part is, I admittedly don't know but I'd assume more than half. [A fast search says ~25% of new knowledge]. You don't use "scientific literature" again so this may not influence the conclusions it is nonetheless in the very first sentence with the most attention.
@Hammerwell *I* didn't mention scientific literature at all, I'm not the author of the paper that I linked to.
However if you read the full paper (links on the right) you will find that it does not claim that AI is the first or only attempt to enclose the scientific commons. The academic publishing racket you brought up is specifically mentioned as an example of such an attempt. It also notes that the attempt to enclose the scientific commons with journal paywalls has not been entirely successful because it runs counter to the traditional ethos of academia and they have encountered significant pushback. The arXiv "pre-print server" that this paper is published on is a prime example. In a number of fields scientists use these servers to make most of the papers that they write available to everyone for free even if they are subsequently officially published in a paywalled journal. This is just one aspect of the open access movement in science.
@spacelizard Oh, sorry. That you aren't the author I didn't read. Yes, the paywall doesn't extend to anything. Hence my bad try at an estimation of it. It is a big part of science publication though. And because of this, all of science publication can't be commons (It's owned by someone). And my little jab was merely about that part, and because it sits so prominent in front, and not about the analysis of AI impact.