[satvikpendem]

Maybe it used to but with companies like Disney lengthening copyright times way beyond the original intention, or corporations patenting absurd things, it seems to be more of a way to entrench power than any sort of democratization. I'm glad generative AI seem to be bypassing all this and actually democratizing returns on the creative process, by flagrantly violating the concept of IP.

[kazinator]

In the case of BSD-like licenses, IP is applied in a way that discourages plagiarism, while giving all the practical freedoms to the users, including making proprietary products.

In the case of copyleft licenses like GPL, IP is applied in a way to ensure that users have the code.

These things are taken away when the code is laundered through AI.

[bitwize]

Again, start talking to people outside the field of programming and ask them how they like it when their labor of passion is "democratized" by AI turning it into unattributable slurry.

[satvikpendem]

I don't really care how they like it because it's not up to them how I use the tools I want to use. It's literally the same argument photographers faced 100 years ago and in another 100 years I guarantee no one will be talking about AI in the terms you are today.

[bitwize]

No one started photographing paintings and declaring them free to use. If they did the lawsuits would leave a huge impact crater.

Photography started displacing painting as a form of portraiture, but displacing a technique is not the same thing as appropriating the work itself.

[satvikpendem]

I don't see any issues with "appropriating" a work especially if it's not a one to one copy which AI does not produce (without out some pretzel level prompting), especially with regards to visual media (what even is appropriation in this case? Your example of photographers taking images of paintings is not the same as how AI training occurs). In other words, training is and should be free and fair use.

[kazinator]

> training is and should be free and fair use.

Of course the AI robber barons would that it be so, but it must not be and should not be.

Training gobbles up works in their entirety, verbatim.

Fair use of the verbatim words of a written work requires the excerpt to be small.

Fair use also usually requires attribution, which is missing.

Transformative works like parodies are also fair use, but the LLM isn't transformative int his sense; it's strawman transformative like a meat grinder.

Parodies use the structure of something existing, as a vehicle for original thought which is why they are protected from copyright claims by the authors of whatever is pariodied.

[satvikpendem]

Again, IP is an outdated concept in this day and age. In all honestly there shouldn't even be the notion of fair use, any transformative work should be allowed. There is nothing about LLM training that isn't transformative, just as, well, grinding meat from a steak into stuffed sausages transforms it.

I'm not even talking about big corporations with proprietary models, in fact I oppose their not being open source or weight, I want more open models not fewer as that at least democratizes the value of LLMs. The worst case is having copyright hawks allowing regulatory capture by big AI corps by pushing regulations about licensing content, which, of course, no open model company will be able to afford in the future. I find that infinitely worse than having more lax copyright laws, where only a few corporations can tell you want to think via usage of their LLMs.

Lastly, no one can tell me from first principles why LLM training is bad, on the copyright side, other than, it just is, because copyright law dictates it so. Perhaps copyright law is what needs to be abolished, not LLMs.

[kazinator]

Even today, in 2026, it is possible to use photography in ways that infringe copyright! You literally cannot just snap your shutter over anything whatsoever and call it yours!