[satvikpendem]

When Stable Diffusion and GitHub Copilot came out a few years ago is when I really started seeing this "immoral" mentality about AI, and like you it really left me scratching my head, why now and not before? Turns out, people call it immoral when they see it threatens its livelihood and come up with all sorts of justifications that seem justifiable, but when you dig underneath it, it's all about their economic anxiety, nothing more. Humans are not direct creatures, it's much more emotional than one would expect.

[bayindirh]

I believe it's more nuanced than that.

The immoral thing about gen-AI is how it's trained. Regardless of source code, images or audio; the disregard of licenses and considering everything fair-use and ingesting them is the most immoral part.

Then there comes the environmental cost, and how it's downplayed to be able to pump the hype.

I'm not worried about the change AI will bring, but the process of going there is highly immoral, esp. when things are licensed to prohibit that kind of use.

When AI industry says "we'll be dead if we obey the copyright and licenses", you know something is wrong. Maybe the whole industry shouldn't build a business model of grabbing whatever they can and running with it.

Because of these zealots, I'm not sharing my photos anymore and considering not sharing the code I write either. Because I share these for the users, with appropriate licenses. Not for other developers or AI companies to fork, close and do whatever do like with them.

[satvikpendem]

I find copyright itself immoral. Intellectual "property" is a made up fiction that shouldn't exist and only entrenches existing players, see Disney lobbying continuously to get higher and higher copyright durations all to keep Mickey under their control, until very recently; patents too are not filed by individual inventors anymore, it's massive corporations and patent trolls that serve no useful purpose. There is a reason many programmers like open source and especially copyleft, the latter of which is an explicit battling of the copyright system through its own means. Information should be free to be used, it should not be hoarded by so-called copyright holders.

[bayindirh]

I believe I failed to convey what I'm trying to say.

I'm a strong believer on copyleft. I only share my code with GNU/GPLv3+, no exceptions.

However, this doesn't allow AI companies to scrape it, remix it and sell it under access. This is what I'm against.

If scraping, closing and selling GPLv3 or strong copylefted material is fair use, then there's no use of having copyleft if it can't protect what's intended to be open.

Protecting copyleft requiring protecting copyright, because copyleft is built upon copyright mechanism itself.

While I'm not a fan of a big media company monopolizing something for a century, we need this framework to keep things open, as well. Copyright should be reformed, not abolished.

[satvikpendem]

Consider regulatory capture though. If we have such entrenched copyright that only big companies can afford to pay the licensing fees, then we'll never have actually democratized open source models. It's actually a method of entrenched players of a market to want regulation because they know only they can comply with them, effectively turning it into a de facto monopoly. That is precisely why I want all information to be free, and to allow anyone and everyone to copy my works. And also because copyleft exists only as a response to copyright, otherwise those that favor copyleft would just prefer no copyright at all; many only prefer it because that's the only way to enforce their wishes to have copyright be abolished. In my mind, I see the higher order effects of only allowing big players to pay for copyright, because it's not as simple as licensing it to them. Hopefully I have changed your mind as to copyright, otherwise I'd be happy to continue the conversation.

[bayindirh]

I believe that's a bit of a shallow/narrow take.

Yes, copyleft exists as a response to copyright, but it builds something completely different with respect to what copyright promises. While copyright protects creators, copyleft protects users. This part is generally widely misunderstood.

Deregulation to prevent regulatory capture is not a mechanism that works when there's money and a significant power imbalance. Media companies can always put barriers to the consumption of their products through contracts and other mechanisms. Signing a contract not to copy the thing you get to see can get out of hand in very grim ways. Consumers are very weak compared to the companies providing the content, because of the desirability of the content alone, even if you ignore all the monetary imbalance.

Moreover, copyleft doesn't only prevent that kind of exploitation; it actively protects the user by making it impossible to close the thing you get. Copyleft protects all the users of the thing in question. When the issue is viewed in the context of the software, it not only allows the code to propagate indefinitely but also allows it to be properly preserved for the long run.

Leaving things free-for-all again not only fails to protect the user but also profits the bigger companies, since they have the power to hoard, remix, refine, and sell this work, which they get for free. So, it only carries water to the big companies' water wheels. Moreover, even permissive licenses depend on the notion of copyright to attribute the artifact to its original creator.

Otherwise, even permissively licensed artifacts can be embedded in the works of larger companies and not credited, allowing companies to slightly derive the things they got for free and sell them to consumers on their own terms, without any guardrails.

So abolishing copyright not only will further un-democratize things, but it'll make crediting the creators of the building blocks the companies use to erect their empires impossible.

This is why I will always share my work under strong copyleft or non-commercial/share-alike (and no-derivatives, where it makes sense) licenses.

In short, I'm terribly sorry to tell you that you didn't convince me about abolishing copyright at all. The only thing you achieved was to think further on my stance, fill the mental gaps I found in my train of thought, and fill them appropriately with more copyleft support. Also, it looks like my decision not to share my photos anymore is getting more concrete.