How so? His reasoning to me seemed consistent with decades of case law with respect to technology and copyright infringement. Certainly it was consistent with prior rulings finding time shifting to be legal (Tivo), or format shifting (VHS, audio cassettes and CD ripping and burning, also Google Scholar). It was consistent with rulings finding that copies made for commercial purposes, even when that purposed might have an impact on the market for the item being copied or incidental markets can still be fair use (Connectix Virtual Game Station). And it was certainly consistent with rulings finding that fair use can still open you up to extensive and possibly threatening levels of competition (the Java API and Google's use thereof in Android). Honestly, I'm not sure how anyone who has followed the general direction of copyright and IP rulings over the last few decades was surprised at all that Anthropic succeeded on "training an AI model is fair use".
> The assumption with a retro game decompilation is that you take the game apart and learn how it works. The journey is as important as the destination, but when you use AI for this you skip the journey and make the destination pointless.
That might be your goal with a decompilation. But some people might just want to play their old games on different hardware. I doubt the goal of Connectix was to "learn" how the playstation bios worked when they made their copies for the Virtual Game Station. And I'd wager good money that well over 90% of the people that use any of the retro emulation software and hardware out there have almost no interest in the "journey" of building the emulator and learning how the game hardware worked except to the extent that they need to know that information to play whatever game they want to place.
> There is a parallel set of concerns being voiced by artists, too: that the artistic process is as valuable if not moreso than the actual work product.
A similar argument was made during the early backlash (and indeed is sometimes still made in the modern incarnation of the backlash) against CGI and computer animation. Yet today, it's clear that CGI and computer animation is its entire, different but equally skilled, branch of artistic endeavor. Despite early attempts to treat it as "push a button and the computer does it for you" the end result has been simply higher levels of expectation and demand that has birthed its own branch of heretofore unknown skills. Likewise, plenty of skeptics thought synthesizers and drum machines took all the skill out of making music. And yet, the music industry and artists continue to generate plenty of art, even when using these labor and process "destroying" tools.
So the question becomes, why do you think LLMs and other AI tools are unique among technological advancements and will not be subjected to the same "opening new frontiers" effects that prior advancements have all had, despite their detractors?