> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. This rhetoric sounds impressive, but really looks more like "piracy is theft" line from early 2000s, similarly flawed in basic premise.
It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been.
I spent 20 years working as a freelancer and 10 years selling tech video courses. I made enough to have a happy life (not a lot but enough to survive), as long as the income kept flowing every month.
Nowadays I make nothing from a business I've built up for 2 decades because AI took away most traffic to my site which was the entry point to my business. I actually lose money because course sales have been impacted so heavily that I pay more for hosting than I get in sales.
AI is consuming an unimaginable amount of searches which is the gateway for so many businesses. It's preventing people from being discovered on the internet. Not only that but it's taking everyone's content and selling it back to users while keeping all of the profits.
Someone once told me, any illegal thing can become legal if you add extra steps. This is not _legally_ true, but it is _practically_ true. Evading a tariff is illegal, until you start using a proxy-country. Firing an employee, and not giving them severance is illegal, until you find a way to make their job so miserable, that they quit on their own. Really, if you can turn signal into _noise_, it becomes difficult and expensive for the enforcement organs to actually enforce their own rules.
It is unclear to me just what percentage of tech-companies, are in the business of adding extra steps to an illegal process, of turning signal into noise. For example, the vapes made by Juul are a kind of hack around public health laws. The Amazon marketplace shields merchants who sell counterfeit goods. Uber and Lyft bypassed the local laws that applied to taxi services and the medallion system. Airbnb did something similar with the laws governing hotels, and delineating who owns and who rents.
It is a special kind of disappointment, to be someone who loves technology, and to have to work in the technology industry -- because it appears to be run by people who hate everything that is not money.
> It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been.
It's literally stolen IP.
One minus epsilon of the corpus did not give informed consent, or get compensated. The fact that it's laundered doesn't make it any less literally stolen.
I'm sad to hear your business model didn't survive the march of technology, but at the same time, this is what's been happening to everyone ultimately. And rightfully, no one is entitled to a business model working in perpetuity.
I know this is a real harm to individuals, and bringing this up is not some kind of anti-technological thinking (the luddites were OG with that, and I always argue in favor of them - they had a very valid point).
I also realize that in a few years, I very well may be in the same position here. So will most of us.
But that's a different argument than GP was making, different one from what I replied to. That was about losing culture, and losing a business model is not losing culture.
Also I was with you all the way until the last paragraph:
> AI is consuming an unimaginable amount of searches which is the gateway for so many businesses. It's preventing people from being discovered on the internet.
AI is doing exactly what users want it to - what I too use it for - it bypasses the spam and scams that stand between the user and the solution to their problem. Good riddance, in this.
> Not only that but it's taking everyone's content and selling it back to users while keeping all of the profits.
And that is just bullshit. AI is not "taking everyone's content and selling it back to users", and the vendors are definitely not "keeping all of the profits" - on the contrary, they haven't even begun to figure out how to monetize almost any of the value their inference services provide, because they have zero visibility into how much any stream of tokens ends up being worth for their customers. They cannot tell whether the plumbing advice the LLM generated unclogged my toilet, or prevented a restaurant from having to close for the day; they cannot tell if the code their agent wrote won me a beer from a friend, or unblocked $2 000 000 dollar opportunity for my business. They capture none of the value from this either way.
> And rightfully, no one is entitled to a business model working in perpetuity.
I know, I worked very hard for 20 years to build up this business. I easily put in tens of thousands of hours to document, record and open source pretty much everything I learned and experienced in tech for free to help build up an audience.
It worked great up until AI, then everything went downhill very fast which is solely related to nothing but less traffic coming to my site. I imagine this will affect everyone, not just me.
> And that is just bullshit
It's not, whether or not they are profitable isn't important. The takeaway is AI creators consumed all of this content then they turned around and are actively selling that information to other people. This is the only part of the pipeline that matters, whether it's profitable on a balance sheet for them isn't important to everyone who had their content scraped, stolen and sold. The damage is already done at that point to the original content creator.
To pour even more salt in the wound, the AI creators actively cause content creators to directly lose money on hosting because every time they scrape your site that costs bandwidth. If your hosting provider is metered, then you're paying directly out of pocket.
> It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been.
There actually was theft. See how some big corporations slurped data from Libgen and Anna's Archive. Where did they pay for this?
See also this article:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/03/meta-has-stole...
And similar articles.
It is theft - there is no denying in that.
All these companies owe us a ton of money. But Trump protects the AI mafia so we won't get compensation for the damage they cause here.