AI is a business model stress test

The thing is, copyright law is not really on your side. Viewing copyrighted material without paying for it is not generally something people get fined for. A lot of training falls under fair use that overrides whatever license you come up with. Disney can’t stop me from uploading clips of their movies alongside commentary and review because fair use allows that. LLMs generally aren’t redistributing code, which is the thing that copyright protects.

If I inspect some GPL code and get inspired by it and write something similar, the GPL license doesn’t apply to me.

It has always been the case that if you don’t want other people to apply fair use to your works, your only recourse is to keep those works private. I suspect that now individuals and companies that don’t want their code to be trained on will simply keep the code private.

Now, there have been times where LLMs have reproduced verbatim copyright material. The NYTimes sued OpenAI over this issue. I believe they’ve settled and come up with a licensing scheme unless I’m mixing up my news stories.

Second thing, your issue becomes moot if there exists a model that only trains off of MIT-licensed code, and there is a TON of that code out there.

Third thing, your issue becomes moot if users have agreed to submit their code for training, like what the GitHub ToS does for users who don’t change their settings, or if giant companies with giant code bases just use their own code to train LLMs.

Where I agree with you is that perhaps copyright law should evolve. Still, I think there’s a practical “cat is out of the bag” issue.

Copyright and copyleft only deal with source code distribution. Your last sentence is not really true from a factual perspective.

I think if you really believe in the open source free software mentality that code should be available to help everyone and improvements to it should also be available and not locked up behind a corporate wall (e.g., a company using GPL code and releasing it with modifications without redistributing the source code), LLMs should be the least of your worries since they don’t do that action. On a literal level they don’t violate GPLv2/v3.

Perhaps copyright law needs new concepts to respond to this change in capability compared to the past, but so far there has been very little legal success with companies and individuals trying to litigate AI companies for copyright violations. Direct violations have been rare and only get more rare over time as training methods evolve.

LLMs broke that social contract. Now that product will likely go away.

People can twist themselves into knots about how LLMs create “value” and that makes all of this ok, but the truth is they stole information to generate a new product that generates revenue for themselves at the cost of other people’s work. This is literally theft. This is what copyright law is meant to protect. If LLM manufacturers are making money off someone’s work, they need to compensate people for that work, same as any client or customer.

LLMs are not doing this for the good of society. They themselves are making money off this. And I’m sure if someone comes along with LLM 2.0 and rips them off, they’re going to be screaming to governments and attorneys for protection.

The ironic part of all of this is that LLMs are literally killing the businesses they need to survive. When people stop visiting (and paying) Tailwind, Wikipedia, news sites, weather, and so on, and only use LLMs, those sites and services will die. Heck, there’s even good reason to think LLMs will kill the Internet at large, at least as an information source. Why in the hell would I publish news or a book or events on the Internet if it’s just going to be stolen and illegally republished through an LLM without compensating me for my work? Once this information goes away or is locked behind nothing but paywalls, I hope everyone is ready for the end of the free ride.