AI’s Unpaid Debt: How LLM Scrapers Destroy the Social Contract of Open Source

cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/3176616

TL;DR: The big tech AI company LLMs have gobbled up all of our data, but the damage they have done to open source and free culture communities are particularly insidious. By taking advantage of those who share freely, they destroy the bargain that made free software spread like wildfire.

https://www.quippd.com/writing/2025/12/17/AIs-unpaid-debt-how-llm-scrapers-destroy-the-social-contract-of-open-source.htmlOpen link View original on lemmy.world

Comments2

friend_of_satan

lemmy.world

Also:

https://eyeofthesquid.com/ai-is-breaking-the-moral-foundation-of-modern-society-a145d471694f

AI renders [Rawls' and Nozick's] disagreement moot by violating the premise they shared. When your talents become training data harvested without consent, when your creative work becomes parameters in a model, you’re being used as a pure instrument. Not for social benefit (Rawls’s concern) and not with your voluntary consent (Nozick’s requirement). You’re raw material extracted for someone else’s capital accumulation. Both philosophers would recognize this as the instrumentalization they were trying to prevent.

very_well_lost reply

lemmy.world

I've started hearing the term "reverse centaur" being used to describe this situation:

In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

And obviously, a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-12-05-pop-that-bubble-u-washington-8b6b75abc28e