Creative Commons itself takes the, IMO very reasonable, view that training AI models on copyrighted works constitutes fair use:
https://creativecommons.org/2023/08/18/understanding-cc-licenses-and-generative-ai/

The folks who are calling such training "theft" might regret what they seem to be implicitly asking for, i.e. much stricter copyright. Copyright law won't prevent Microsoft, Google, OpenAI or Adobe from making shady licensing deals, but they'll prevent the free/open community from keeping up.

Some of the anti-#AI backlash seems to go hand in hand with an explicit or implicit defense and support for copyright -- a questionable institution that aggregates power with the Disneys & Apples of this world.

I am very skeptical that a just world is one that still makes heavy use of intellectual monopoly rights to secure individual incomes.

Copyright should, IMO, at best be regarded as a necessary evil, one which we have failed to rid ourselves of along with capitalism.

@eloquence I think that when it comes to artists, I personally can understand viewing it as theft. The most popular AI tools charge people to use them and in that way they are saying that their work entitles them to money but the work of artists is fair to exploit.

Like yes, fuck companies and their copyrights, but profiting off of others work at the scale of AI is a level of exploitation that these companies couldn’t achieve before. Regardless of how much we hate the system we operate within, if large swaths of work were necessary to improve the quality of a model, there should be explicit consent or compensation

@cederbs

I disagree with the term "theft" in connection with information, but I do certainly view this as a cycle of exploitation that is emblematic for capitalism.

Google "organizing the world's information", slapping ads next to excerpts, and surveilling the shit out of everyone who uses their products, to me, is a version of the same thing. It's perfectly legal (which training AI models may also prove to be, depending on pending court cases), but also exploitative.

@cederbs

But the anti-AI lawsuits, if won, would not lead to benign or positive long term outcomes. Tightening copyright in this manner would benefit those who can exercise the most leverage using law.

In this way, the lawsuits are, in my view, potentially even _part_ of the cycle of exploitation (the exploited unwittingly aiding the exploiters), leading to new forms of profit extraction.

@cederbs

Moreover, aside from hope for a one-time settlement for litigants, it's not clear that it would do _anything_ to address the underlying issues. Models like Adobe Firefly are based on licensed work and available now, similarly for-profit. Such models are labor-displacing, potentially exploitative (depending on licensing deals), but almost certainly lawsuit-proof.

And successful lawsuits will just lead to more Fireflies, at best yielding pennies in licensing fees.