Given that the "AI" community apparently couldn't care less about treating intellectual property rights with wanton abandon, I can't say such a response would be unwarranted.

Dire circumstances call for drastic measures, as they say.

Quite a sad, but completely understandable reaction. The saddest part is probably that it's already too late to prevent people from generating TB deepfakes and other content. Cloning a voice takes half an hour if clips now, any downloaded live stream should be enough already.

It's sad to see AI on a path to destroy years of collected internet content. I expect the internet archive to receive loads of takedown requests in the coming months and years because of this.

Or just the reign of brevity. Sheer volume is no longer impressive.

Your ideas are low probability autocomplete. GPT wants popular ideas, not novel ideas.

A lovely sentiment in theory, but Waldo is still perniciously difficult to find even though he dresses differently from every other character.

I'll just run it though an AI upscaler before I run it though the AI language model.

The current (legal) answer is "unclear". There are indications that training is fine, but producing and using the generated content is questionable at least. As many IP issues, it will solved only when someone will try that in court and go all the way until a verdict. Some cases are actually being processed but it might take years to get an answer.

Every time I bring this up, people accuse me of resisting progress, "the cats out of the bag", etc.

It has been frustrating.

Copyright's been dead since the internet was born. I really do think it's the least of our problems when it comes to abstract reasoning engines.

I think it’s not very hard; if the AI companies believe the data they trained on is public domain/open because they scraped it of the internet, then their trained weights must publicly available as well. They cannot claim ‘but training is expensive’; if they do, then they should pay fees for the hosting and storage and writing time of all data they scraped. I prefer open weights as it’s more practical. Your weights have a sliver of GPL source in it? Well that infected the entire thing as GPL does: it is ours now too!

Imagine a friend asks for help in a class. You can either spend some time and try to teach them the subject or let them copy off you during the exam. The former generally feels good despite taking more effort. The latter often feels bad even if it doesn't impact you negatively in any way and helps your classmate more than if you did nothing.

The human to human connection that a blog or social media conversation creates feels a lot more like teaching your classmate while the AI feels a lot more like someone cheating off your work. Plus the AI didn't even bother to get your approval before copying from you. The whole thing feels ethically compromised regardless of the ultimate result.

Anonymous people regurgitate the thoughts of well-known individuals such as Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky. The fact that their thoughts are regurgitated is a testament to how well known they are already and how much their content is read by other people. Nobody is going to steal their limelight only on the basis of paraphrasing their ideas. However, if someone does write original ideas of their own, they may gain some notoriety for themselves.

Now imagine that Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky were able to read everything being written by every anonymous unknown on the internet, and create content paraphrasing any and every original thought that was created by anonymous individuals at will. How do the original creators of these thoughts have any chance to succeed on their own merit, if Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky (who everyone knows already as sources of ideas) are able to write the same stuff as soon as the anonymous person has made it public?