> How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was ingested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, That's fine if he feels that way, but he can only speak for himself, not for all the copyright holders of the other code that was "ingested" to power LLMs. If you want to see how most creators who care about their work and actually own it (unlike most software), look at many book authors and illustrators. Many of w…
I expect book authors and artists to have very different opinions on this than programmers, because there isn't really a book/art equivalent of deliberately sharing open source libraries for other people to integrate into their projects. The closest is probably music sampling, which has had a very robust money-based licensing scheme built around it for many years.
If we go back to the RMS school of code sharing, which influenced much of contemporary open source, they're very big on licensing to control how the code is shared.
This was actually a break from some of the earlier thinking by some programmers (not all), that code is implicitly public domain, or should be. RMS said, yes, sharing is good, but we need rules to keep the sharing happening.
Once "open source" was coined (by ESR, et al.) they were also big on licensing, including RMS's licenses, but most of the reasons were more about commercial needs.
Since then, people participate in open source for a variety of reasons, many of them commercial-adjacent.
But I suspect most people don't think much about the hard-earned licenses that helped create the current environment, in which this wealth of loose sharing and collaborating is happening.
We're only starting to see the effects when some AI companies ignore the long tradition of licenses that built open source.
Writers and illustrators, on the other hand, as you say, don't have that tradition and institution. (There's also things like the sometimes tolerated gray area of fanfic using others' characters and situations, but AFAIK not official and organized like open source.)
And so maybe the essence of what's happening is more readily obvious to writers and illustrators, than it is to programmers.