If this AI worked without training, no one would say anything.
I don’t believe that for one second.
People are rightfully scared of professional and economic disruption. OMG training is just a convenient bit of rhetoric to establish the moral high ground. If and when AIs appear that are entirely trained on public domain and synthetic data, there will be some other moral argument.
Same goes for music. If you need AI and autotune, find another way to earn a living.
It’s a high percentage. But time, increased personal wealth, and “OMG this might affect me” all have a lot of power.
- LLMs were trained on copy protected content and devaluing the input a worker puts into creating original work
- LLMs are a tool for generating statistical variations and refinements of work, this doesn't devalue the input but makes generating output easier
Form vs Function issues. So it would be preferable to give people a legal pathway to continue making money and own their work instead of allowing their work to be vacuumed up by the people at corporations looking to automate them away. The functional issue still exists but doesn't put your personal work at risk of theft/abuse outside of it's economic intent. Then the social stigma doesn't really matter because "an LLM is just a tool" is now a solid argument not causing abuse or deterioration of existing legal protections.
petabytes of training data are transformed into mere gigabytes of model weights. no existing copyright laws are violated. until new laws declare that permission is required, this is a non-argument.
>If this AI worked without training, no one would say anything.
adobe firefly was trained on licensed content, and rest assured, the anti-AI zealots don't give it a pass.
the copyright is just one of the many angles they use to decry the thing that threatens their jobs.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/judge-meta-case-wei...
> "You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products," Chhabria told Meta's attorneys. "You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person's work, and you're saying that you don't even have to pay a license to that person."
> "I just don't understand how that can be fair use," Chhabria said.
https://ipwatchdog.com/2025/05/12/copyright-office-weighs-ai...
> Stylistic imitation even without substantial similarity would likely be implicated under such a [market-dilution] theory, which could be considered as a market effect under factor four that diminishes the value of the original work used to train the model.
I'm not American, but it's clear to me that it will be the supreme court that ultimately decides whether licensing is necessary or not. the parties involved - the megacorps with infinite money and the litigious publishers - won't settle for less.
and given that the ruling in favor of the publishers would all but kill the American AI efforts (good luck licensing millions of works needed to train a coherent model) and greatly benefit China (who doesn't give a fuck about IP), I find it highly likely that it will not happen.