this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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[โ€“] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 3 points 12 minutes ago* (last edited 10 minutes ago)

AI companies turned it all into products worth billions.

AI companies would appreciate you telling them where those products are, because they are almost universally losing money.

[โ€“] AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@piefed.social 19 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

No, no. It's dumber:

The library is still open, you can freely enter. But now they've put "a guy" in the library to whom you can pay money and they will answer your question with the stuff they "more or less remember".

[โ€“] Pika@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

This isn't just with projects either

I was looking at property records and property lines for my state yesterday to try to resolve a question that my mom had regarding land that she was getting.

The first two and a half pages of search results are all websites where you have to pay a subscription fee in order to get the land owner's information.

This is all information that is provided by my state free of charge via their website. I had to filter through two and a half pages before I found the original source of the information that all of those websites are leeching off.

It's ridiculous the amount of paid services that use free-to-use services, it's just they pay more of an advertising, so therefore they're the only thing the user sees.

If I hadn't already known that the state provided it free a charge to anyone who asked or went on their website anyway, I likely would have figured it just cost money to request the records.

[โ€“] floofloof@lemmy.ca 58 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

We built the library. Someone else started charging admission.

Capitalism working as intended.

[โ€“] ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com 17 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Came to the comments to post the "first time?" meme but yes exactly this. This isn't a bug of capitalism, it isn't even a feature; it's literally just capitalism itself. That's how it works

[โ€“] valar@lemmy.ca 12 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

On point, but it's been a lot longer than 20 years

[โ€“] myrmidex@belgae.social 11 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

ever since one guy said 'this granary belongs to me now' and people believed him.

[โ€“] FluorideMind@lemmy.world 6 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

They are right. Ai is just an attempt to monitize the Internet.

[โ€“] Zephyr@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 hour ago

I mean so are social networks mostly and most search engines and so on. Name of the game is to provide a service to gain people's attention to serve them ads and / or collect their data. Either that or you pay for it up front and they still serve ads and collect your data.

[โ€“] verstra@programming.dev 4 points 1 hour ago

Well, yes, but also - you don't have to pay them. There are open-weights models you can run locally that contain most of that common-wealth knowledge.

[โ€“] gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 hour ago

This is an insightful post, it's not funny though?

It's just depressing, there's no humour here

[โ€“] DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

The whole point of make our lives an endless cash grab.

[โ€“] Zephyr@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 hour ago

I mean there's almost no secret sauce about these AI's currently which is why open source models are nearly as good. We are totally free to set up a nonprofit kinda like Wikipedia where people donate to train and run AI models for the public based on open source datasets. We're now seeing people like PewDiePie kinda getting the ball rolling.

[โ€“] blueyonder@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

Please link to the original social-media post so that we can like or boost it in its own network.