A Boring Dystopia

This comparison is flawed. Training AI on freely available data isn’t the same as pirating copyrighted material. Piracy means unauthorized access for personal use or distribution, while AI training processes text as input without reproducing or selling it directly.

You can’t have a system where individuals expect free access to information but demand that corporations pay for the same data. If something is truly free, it should be free for everyone.

No one expects an artist inspired by Michelangelo or Raphael to pay their estates for using their techniques or styles. Once knowledge and creativity enter the public domain, they become part of collective human progress.

That said, I fully support what Aaron Swartz did—hell, I would’ve done it myself. But on the flip side, let’s not ignore that JSTOR was a subscription-based service, meaning he was literally stealing paywalled content. It’s not the same as AI training on publicly available data.

And let’s be real—the three platforms mentioned exist in a legal gray area. It’s hypocritical to say individuals can use them freely, but corporations can’t. These sites exist solely to make information accessible to everyone, and you can’t pick and choose who gets to benefit.

I immediately thought of Aaron when I read about Facebook torrenting books.

but we shouldn't want anyone prosecuted at all

A wise man once told me: "there's no such thing as problems, just expenses"

As someone who made several bold moves over the last 7 years to get on the right side of a very obvious societal slide to selfishness, I can confirm.

The assets I cobbled together have allowed me to do the little things like sanitize all my house's air and water on entry ahead of this digital cold war. China is literally dormant in a large percentage of US utilities' networks waiting for orders. I expect them to poison water supplies remotely by releasing normally-benign water treatment chemicals in unsafe doses.

To all those who said I was crazy for putting my sweat and tears into preparing: I never could have guessed it'd be this bad, this quickly either. Happy I followed my gut though!

True hero, a legend