cross-posted from: https://feddit.online/c/mildlyinfuriating/p/1784290/interesting
I don’t see the humor…
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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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.
Well it's just that the products worth billions cost trillions to make.
And anytime they try to rectify people balk at the price increase and drop.
It’s not the critical lynchpin of work that they were hoping they could charge stupid money for.
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".
The guy is also standing right next to the computer terminal where you can search for books, and starts telling you everything they think they know about the book you're looking up, whether you asked or not.
He also broke the terminal a bit, making everything just a little bit slower and the results a little less useful. Cause he's definitely better than that thing.
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.
We built the library. Someone else started charging admission.
Capitalism working as intended.
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
This is an insightful post, it's not funny though?
It's just depressing, there's no humour here
On point, but it's been a lot longer than 20 years
ever since one guy said 'this granary belongs to me now' and people believed him.
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.
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.
Absolutely true, but that doesn't change the fact that those AI companies stole the knowledge to train their models and they did this on a massive scale.
It's so ridiculous to see a guy torrenting a few movies getting jailtime while the AI companies make off with the biggest IP heist in history and get applauded for it.
There could be a class action lawsuit. I wonder how other major players in AI are managing this, particularly labs in China, Israel, UK, Singapore, and India. Of course each nation had its own laws around copyright. Like isn't there an equal pushback like this for Chinese AI labs or is it a uniquely American or western thing?
They are right. Ai is just an attempt to monitize the Internet.
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.
The whole point of make our lives an endless cash grab.
Please link to the original social-media post so that we can like or boost it in its own network.
It was on X. I, for one, don’t want that. This person should be on mastodon and giving them a like would effectively reward them to stay on that Nazi platform and give clicks to Xitter. Effffffffff that.