I've resigned from my role leading the Audio team at Stability AI

Maybe current AI output is still too similar to the training data, but that seems like more of a reason to regulate the output and not the input. We already have legal frameworks to prevent people from replicating the work of others. I don’t understand why there needs to be a distinction from using copyrighted works to train computers vs people.

Fair use's factors each weigh for or against a finding of fair use, as opposed to needing to strictly satisfy all four. In particular, what machine learning is likely heavily resting on is that "The more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors" (Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music).

For instance, Google Translate was trained on translator's works, and may in part compete with the market for translations, but I'd claim is transformative by nature of adding something new (instant on-demand translation of novel text) and not merely superseding the static works it was trained on.

How to decide "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work" is also a bit of a gray area and one of the questions the US Copyright Office were seeking comments on. Should it be about the impact models have on the market for that general class class of works? Or, the extent to which training on a specific work impacted the market for that specific work compared to if the model was not trained on that work?

He may want to be an author or musician someday and it is clearly in society's best interest to ensure his mind remains uncorrupted by words and ideas belonging to others.

How much better might the world be had Ford done the same and not endangered the employment of individual manual auto workers with his assembly line, or Gutenberg been more mindful of those poor calligraphers who worked tirelessly for centuries in preserving the books he would otherwise have never been able to print.

The idea that progress is perhaps more important to society's overall health than the preservation of the status quo is such a horrid idea and I mourn the many chiselers who lost their jobs to bronze smithing.

Also, maybe with Neuralink we can finally identify exactly what copyrighted works inform human creativity such that we can properly charge licensing and residuals for such usage.

At least then we might see advancing technology used for something good.

In the case of the generative AI companies, I think there is a good amount of content that has been consumed that was neither in the public domain or properly licensed.

So what is the legal remedy?

I can see the argument to be made, but I personally think they either come from a zero-sum mentality (lack of abundance mentality in this case) or, likely not in this authors' case, or are being called upon as a way to address a different issue (fear, typically)

It's also not technically possible at this point to attribute generated content back to the source training data, so either works will have to be equally compensated (including my meme posted on Reddit) or each piece will need to be individually negotiated with the rights holder. I don't see how these models can exist in these conditions

Humans can also create works that compete with the copyrighted works they've been trained on. Should music schools and conservatoriums start banning all commercial works during lessons? Should students forfeit a % of their lifetime earnings distributed to the copyright holders of everything they have listened to in their lives so far? Granted, nobody will be happy with computers taking over chunks of 'creative' work, but this hard stance will not hold water.

I applaud the courage to stand by personal principles over the soft embrace of a nice job though. Not many people can do it, and we need more of it.

By the time everyone realised its profiting at society’s cost it was too late. Attempts to put the genie back into the bottle via gdpr etc are futile

Same here. The ship has functionally sailed already. All the LLMs are trained on this.