It feels like you completely miss the point of copyleft licenses. They definitely do impose constraints. Saying "I believe that LLMs are abusing my license" is absolutely not hypocritical.
I'm saying that the arguments that define this "abuse" often are.
What I specifically find hypocritical, we cannot suddenly put restrictions on what clients may or may not access, read, store and see our content. "Only a human may access my content" is just as bad as these numerous attempts of DRM that "hollywood" has tried to force down on the web.
More practically: I have a blog, with a CC-SA licence on my content. If an LLM starts spewing my exact paragraphs and articles without the same license (the SA-part asks this), I'd be pissed and have a right to call it "abuse" and could quite easily take the company behind it to court (If I wanted to).
But when that LLM merely hashes, vectorifies, trains on, and stores copies of my content so that their project can mimic my tone of voice, ideas and other content, so be it: I find it immoral to impose restrictions on what, who, where and how my content is read. Because I find DRM and such immoral.
What if I copy your article by hand? Or run it through an algorithm that translates it into another language. Can I sell it as my own? Or does it have to go through an LLM for people to sell your work as theirs?
Think about this: what if your job was to write articles, and suddenly nobody buys them anymore because they can read them cheaper on another website that serves them after the LLM laundering? Is it moral for that other website to make money out of your work?
> I find it immoral to impose restrictions on what, who, where and how my content is read.
Did you think that through? Do you find it immoral for a book author to sell their book, and to make it illegal for you to sell copies of it? It feels like you only consider your hobby-blog and ignore those who try to make a living by producing content (e.g. a photographer).
I don't.
A judge will have to decide which it is. So far, they're leaning to "it's not a copy machine"
Edit: and yes. I find it immoral when an author has a say in how I use the book after buying it. Whether I whipe my ass with the paper, or display it in a shrine is non of his business. I bought the carrier, it is mine. And under copyright law (EU), I'm free to sell my copy to a second hand bookstore, and that bookstore is free to sell it and make a profit. I understand the nuances of digital carries that can duplicate their contained knowledge much easier than a paper book can, but I find it immoral that the ebook I buy, cannot be read by my wife on her ereader without her buying it as well.
I see an LLM as a machine that takes an input and automatically gives an output. If that input is copyrighted, and the output is essentially a translation of that input, then it is a problem.
BTW using a camera to take a photo of your code, and then use text recognition to render it (with potential mistakes), and then use an algorithm to correct the mistakes, all that is not exactly "something that copies stuff": you will agree that there is a lot happening. Still you would say that it breaches the copyright "because it is exactly the same text". The thing is, "copyright" is not defined as "exactly the same text" (otherwise you could rename a few variables and be done with it).
> I find it immoral when an author has a say in how I use the book after buying it.
So you find it immoral for an author to sue you because you bought the book, copied it and sold cheaper copies on Amazon? Pretty sure you don't. You can't just ignore all the nuances that don't support your argument... I don't like DRMs either, but it does not mean that the concept of copyright is always wrong.
If I copy-paste your code, can I say that my computer "read your code, learned from it and later wrote something inspired and based on the knowledge it internalized"? If I take a photography of a photography, can I sell it as mine, given that my camera "observed the original and learned from it"?
My opinion is that if you read my code, learn from it and later write something inspired and based on the knowledge you internalized, then that is fine. Because you are a human. But if you do anything that it functionally an obfuscated copy-paste and pretend that you actually created that, then that is not fine.
My argument is "LLMs are not humans, therefore we should be careful with such comparisons". Do you also think that LLMs should have rights? Should it be illegal to make an LLM work 24h a day?
> I work in ML, although not LLM, and I do understand how they work.
I never meant to underestimate ML. However it feels like you underestimate humans :-).
> I don't think you can reduce LLMs to obfuscating copy-pasters. I believe they are closer to our internalizing process
Wow. If you think that LLMs are closer to humans than to copy-pasters... you must not think much of living organisms. Now I understand why ML people think that AGI is coming soon :).