this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
1550 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
87515 readers
3073 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's fascinating how selective people's moral principles become.
When it's AI data centers being robbed, suddenly theft is funny, justified, or even worth celebrating. But if the victims were socialist politicians, transgender people, or any other group this community sympathizes with, the reaction would be outrage and demands for justice.
For the record, I have no issue with people supporting socialism or transgender rights. I only use those examples because they're emotionally charged topics in this community, and they illustrate how quickly people's standards change depending on who the victim is.
Either theft is wrong regardless of who the victim is, or your moral standard changes depending on whether you like the target. That's not a principle. It's favoritism dressed up as ethics.
LLMs are built on theft of intellectual property and copyrighted products by capital managers who hoard wealth propped up on stolen wages and exploitation, look in the mirror before you yap on about selective application of morals.
So absolutely none of that has anything to do with people stealing copper from AI data center construction sites.
You can do all the moral finger-pointing you want. The moment you start selectively deciding who is and isn't a thief is the moment the justice system starts breaking down. You don't get to decide who can and cannot commit crimes. We already have enough of that in our American political system, considering who our president is.
To address your other point, no copyright infringement has been found to have occurred in the training of flagship AI models. If you'd like to debate that, that's fine, but I don't really feel like arguing about it because we're talking about the morality of theft, which you apparently view as something that exists on a selective gradient. Good for you, sir. Go play Robin Hood in your own neighborhood.
Wealth inequality is one of the worst and most pressing issues in the world today. There is nothing I consider more damaging than the growing wealth gap, especially in America. You're absolutely right about that. But once again, it has absolutely nothing to do with construction materials being stolen from AI data center construction sites.
You don't think AI eliminating vast swaths of jobs and exasperating the wealth inequality that's starving the economy has anything to do with an increase in poor and desperate people willing to resort to crime to surive? You do realise that data centers and AI are directly dependent, yes? That conclusion is just burying your head in the sand. Let's not forget who started the moral finger wagging here, pointing to one crime while blinding themselves to another for whatever the irrational reasoning is. Like this particular crime is just happening in a vacuum, and AI isn't infiltrating every aspect of society by design. What's it like to be that selective?
"no copyright infringement has been found to have occurred in the training of flagship AI models" I'm just not going to engage with this level of disingenuous assertion, you're either deluded or you're a liar.
Okay, I'll address this briefly.
When a human artist paints a painting and sells it, does the estate of Michelangelo receive royalties because that artist was inspired by his work?
The reason you believe LLM training is copyright infringement is that you fundamentally misunderstand how the technology works. That's a common theme on this platform among people who oppose AI. Many dislike it because it's become the popular position, not because they understand how these models actually function.
When an AI generates something, it creates a novel output in response to a prompt. It is producing something new, not copying existing works verbatim. Copyright infringement generally requires copying protected expression, and simply learning patterns from publicly available data is not the same thing.
Moreover, you can't have it both ways. If information is publicly available, then it is available to be read, analyzed, and learned from. Either it's public, or it isn't.
More importantly, none of this was the point of my original comment. I'm only addressing it because you clearly want to discuss AI.
For the record, I am completely opposed to what many companies are doing with AI data centers. I think the current trajectory is environmentally damaging, economically questionable, and, in some cases, a humanitarian concern. I've said this repeatedly. You're free to believe me or not, I can't prove my sincerity, but that has been my position throughout.
Now, would you like to discuss the actual topic of conversation, the two-faced nature of Lemmy?
You couldn't pay me enough to waste my brain cells on your disingenuous, fart-sniffing sophistry and bad faith horseshit, so no I don't think I will, get better please.
So basically there's nothing you can do to refute what I'm saying because it's all true so you resort to "nuh-uh" with a thesaurus.
Bad faith?
That is an amazing claim coming from somebody who is literally arguing in bad faith.
You already have a predisposition and bias against AI.
You read my comment and immediately thought, "He's defending AI because he's calling me out on my bullcrap." I'm actually not. I've been making two points: you don't know how AI functions, and you don't know what copyright is.
AI models don't use their training data to reproduce that training data verbatim. Therefore, the training process itself is not copyright infringement. Using publicly available material to train AI is not illegal, nor is it inherently morally reprehensible.
If companies are stealing data to train their AI, then they are breaking the law and should be punished and prosecuted for it.
I do not support that in any way. I also do not support the construction of massive AI data centers. They're a blight on society.
You're upset because I called you out for being stupid. Instead of responding to my arguments, you called me a fart eater and threw around words like "sophistry."
And then you say I'm the one arguing in bad faith.
What a hypocrite.