This feels like the OSS community is giving up. LLMs are lossily-compressed models of code and other text (often mass-scraped despite explicit non-consent) which has licenses almost always requiring attribution and very often other conditions. Just a few weeks ago a SOTA model was shown to reproduce non-trivial amounts of licensed code[0]. The idea of intelligence being emergent from compression is nothing new[1]. Th…
I think you'll find that this is not settled in the courts, depending on how the data was obtained. If the data was obtained legally, say a purchased book, courts have been finding that using it for training is fair use (Bartz v. Anthropic, Kadrey v. Meta).
Morally the case gets interesting.
Historically, there was no such thing as copyright. The English 1710 Statute of Anne establishing copyright as a public law was titled 'for the Encouragement of Learning' and the US Constitution said 'Congress may secure exclusive rights to promote the progress of science and useful arts'; so essentially public benefits driven by the grant of private benefits.
The Moral Bottomline: if you didn't have to eat, would you care about who copies your work as long as you get credited?
The more the people that copy your work with attribution, the more famous you'll be. Now that's the currency of the future*. [1]
You'll do it for the kudos. [2][3]
*Post-Scarcity Future.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quiet_War, et. al.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando