

I think it’s worth reminding people where the general left wing FOSS conscious was before AI. Every week we’d see an article that was the antithesis of ownership, from celebrating the end of Disney copyright to loopholes in trademarks and the like, it was the heart of a lot of content.
There is a fantastic foreword foreword in The Picture of Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde about art for art’s sake that I think about a lot, which really boils down to a litany for art for art’s sake, (and by extension education for education’s sake), that is overlooked in favour of being for the sake of profit or capital.
I am of the opinion that in response to AI, we have drifted from a left wing overall movement that rejected ownership in this way, to a protective, defensive style that is largely that stance of a neo-luddide, without any awareness of what ended that era, which was an insufficient boycott and misspent manpower.
I want to say, I’m someone who is overall against AI, I’m not sure how to prove it, any any time I try to explain points like this, people claim AI wrote my comment.
AI is evil, and has enormous destructive capacity, but making the walled garden of large capitalist software irrelevant in favour of FOSS solutions is a huge win, even in regards to being a result of AI.
I’d rather the water, electrical and creative debt that is incurred by AI is paid off by programs like this, than see companies like Adobe operate, particularly considering they literally changed their TOS to train their internal AI on user data.
Either way, your data is being used to train AI, regardless of if you use Photoshop or Photocraft, but one is FOSS, and openly made with that data.








I very much agree that there is something to highlight in the conversation of private ownership and AI being trained on public work and sold as something private.
I do also think that in this case, a major monopolistic corporation being made irrelevant via the creation of open source software, it’s a net positive.