I think copyright law as a mechanism for incentivizing the creation of new intellectual works is fundamentally challenged by the invention and continued development of the shockingly powerful machine learning technique of generative pre-training and those inspired.
The only reason big companies are under focus is because only they currently have the financial and social resources to afford to train state of the art AI models that threaten human creative work as a means of earning a living. This means we can focus enforcement on them and perpetuate the current legal regime. This moat is absolutely not permanent; we as a species didn’t even know it was actually possible to achieve these sorts of results in the first place. Now that we know, certainly over time we will understand and iterate on these revelations to the point that any individual could construct highly capable models of equal or greater capacity than that which only a few have access to today. I don’t see how copyright is even practically enforceable in such a future. Would we collectively even want to?
Rather than asserting a belief about legal/moral rights or smugly tell real people whose creative passion is threatened by this technology that resistance is futile, I think we need to urgently discuss how we incentivize and materially support the continued human involvement in creative expression before governments and big corporations decide it for us. We need to discussing and advocating for proactive policy on the AI front generally, no job appears safe including those who develop these models and employ them.
Personally, I’m hoping for a world that looks like how chess evolved after computers surpassed the best humans. The best players now analyze their past matches to an accuracy never before possible and use this information to tighten up their game. No one cares about bot matches, it isn’t just about the quality of the moves but the people themselves.