AI is the end of copyright. Hopefully such accusations like "X stole Y" will end in the future and we can appreciate a society where we all have unlimited access to knowledge.
If we were talking about someone breaking into an office and stealing whatever they were working on then your comment would make more sense.
Lots of things sound good in a perfect world, but we don't live in one.
Without copyright, some business models would have to change, but to say that knowledge "would not be generated" is simply false.
Yes people can and will still continue to do stuff for the sake of it. Some of it will be amazing. The huge things like building the next 5 CPU generations though, is that going to be practical? Who will fund that, and why?
Trying not to get political but the end of copyright feels like communism to me. No private property and all that. While I didn't live through it myself, the associated trauma WRT the USSR certainly left some deep scars that people still haven't healed from.
In any case, if -- and it's a big if -- AI continues to develop at the current rate, a solution like UBI will have to be seriously considered. Economies probably don't function when people don't create value, earn, or spend.
What AI demolishes is the pretense that human art is rare and precious, a scarce resource to channel through forced rivers in order to make money.
What machine-learning will probably result in, is a U-turn from the "knowledge economy", based on gatekeeping information, back into manufacturing-oriented systems, based on actually making stuff.
A certain group of people would stop creating content while a new bigger cohort would start, I'm sure it would be a societal gain.
Pricing isn't going to be something they are likely to win on, and the timing is either time to market, or time to release IP. For the former, why buy i9 for $1000 when you can be an Indian alternative for $500 in, let's say, 6 months? For the latter, if companies can release findings after some fuzzy period like "when the prototypes have been validated," that's still IP but with a timed secrecy.