[atomic128]

Probably not.

We have witnessed, over the past few years, an "AI fair use" Pearl Harbor sneak attack on intellectual property.

The lesson has been learned:

In effect, intellectual property used to train LLMs becomes anonymous common property. My code becomes your code with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution or citation.

The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often motivate open source work are undermined. The work is assimilated and resold by the AI companies, reducing the economic value of its authors.

The images, the video, the code, the prose, all of it stolen to be resold. The greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man.

[CamperBob2]

The greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man.

Copyright was always supposed to be a bargain with authors for the ultimate benefit of the public domain. If AI proves to be more beneficial to the public interest than copyright, then copyright will have to go.

You can argue for compromise -- for peaceful, legal coexistence between Big Copyright and Big AI -- but that will just result in a few privileged corporations paywalling all of the purloined training data for their own benefit. Instead of arguing on behalf of legacy copyright interests, consider fighting for open models instead.

In a larger historical context, nothing all that special is happening either way. We pulled copyright law out of our asses a couple hundred years ago; it can just as easily go back where it came from.

[mixdup]

>If AI proves to be more beneficial to the public interest than copyright, then copyright will have to go.

Going forward? Okay, sure. But people created all of the works they created with the understanding of the old system. If you want to change the deal, then creators need to know that first so they can decide if they still want to participate

Allowing everyone to create everything and spend that labor with the promise of copyright, and then pull the rug "oops this is just too important" is not fair to the people who put in that labor, especially when the people redefining the arrangement are getting 100% of the value and the creators got and will get nothing

[CamperBob2]

Life isn't fair, and 100+ year copyright terms enforced eternally with unbreakable DRM sure as hell aren't.

But open-weight LLMs are a pretty decent compromise.

[goku12]

There is one missing factor in your argument. The wealth transfer. The public was almost never the beneficiary of copyright and other IPs. Except perhaps its earliest phases where the copyright had a strict term limit, it was always the corporations who fought for it (Disney being the most infamous), using it to prevent the public from economically benefitting from their work almost forever.

And then people found a way to use the same copyright law to widely distribute their work without the fear of losing attribution or being exploited. Here comes along LLMs that abuse the 'fair use' argument to break attribution and monetize someone else's work. Which way does the money flow? To the corporations again.

IP when it suits them, fair-use when it benefits us. One splendid demonstration of this hypocrisy is how clawd and clawdbot were forced to rename (trademark law in this case). By twisting and reinterpreting laws in whatever way it suits them, these glorified marauders broke a trust mechanism that people relied on for openly sharing their work.

It incentivices ordinary people to hide their work from public. Don't assume that AI is going to solve that loss. The level of original thinking in LLMs is very suspect, despite the pompous and deceitful claims by its creators to the contrary. Meanwhile, the lack of knowledge sharing and cooperation on a global scale will throw civilizational growth rate back into the dark ages. Neither AI, nor corporations are yet anywhere near the creativity and original thinking as the world working together. Ultimately, LLMs serve only the continued one-way transfer of wealth in favor of an insatiably greedy minority, at the cost of losing the benefit of the internet (knowledge sharing) and an enormous damage to the environment - all of which actively harm the public.

[CamperBob2]

Ultimately, LLMs serve only the continued one-way transfer of wealth in favor of an insatiably greedy minority

Including the ones I can run on my own PC at home? I couldn't do that before. Maybe I'm the greedy minority, but I'm stronger and (at least intellectually) wealthier than I was before any of this started happening.

Qwen 3.5, which dropped yesterday, is a genuine GPT 5-class model. Even the ones released by US labs such as OpenAI and Allen AI are legitimate popular resources in their own right. You seem to feel disempowered, while I feel the opposite.

[goku12]

Yes, even the ones you can run on your system. They're no different from proprietary OS and software you used to run on your system, whose design in which you had no say whatsoever. These 'free to run' models are hardly open source. You don't have the data that was used to train them. It's not just about the legality of those data. The dataset chosen may have extreme bias that you can never eliminate satisfactorily from a trained model.

As if that wasn't bad enough, these models cannot be trained on your regular home computer. But instead of striving to improve the energy efficiency of these models, those big corporations build and run massive gas guzzling data centers to train them. They ruin the quality of life for the neighbors through pollution, water depletion and electricity price rise. It also disproportionately affects the poor in the world by reducing supply of essential computing components like RAM (which are needed for medical devices, utility and manufacturing installations and every other aspect of modern life), and by aggravating the climate crisis, whose victims are the poorest.

They don't give you those models out of the goodness of their hearts. Those are just advertisements and trial pieces for their premium services. They also peddle the agenda of its creators. So yes, those models are empowering only in a very narrow sense without any foresight. They are still the money making engines for the rich that subject you to their benevolence, whims and fancies.

[atomic128]

    Once men turned their thinking over to machines
    in the hope that this would set them free.

    But that only permitted other men with machines
    to enslave them.

    ...

    Thou shalt not make a machine in the
    likeness of a human mind.

    -- Frank Herbert, Dune

[CamperBob2]

Eh, we already have a name for the concept of living by plausible-sounding works of fiction: religion.

Yet another post who misses (or chooses to overlook) my point: this stuff is running on my machine. "Seizing the means of production" means going into my back room and pulling a computer out of a rack.

[atomic128]

Alibaba (China) thinks for you. They control you, to some extent.

Wikipedia: "Qwen (also known as Tongyi Qianwen, Chinese: 通义千问; pinyin: Tōngyì Qiānwèn) is a family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud. Many Qwen variants are distributed as open‑weight models under the Apache‑2.0 license, while others are served through Alibaba Cloud. Their models are sometimes described as open source, but the training code has not been released nor has the training data been documented, and they do not meet the terms of either the Open Source AI Definition or the Model Openness Framework from the Linux Foundation."