Personally, I think public info is fair game - consent or not, it’s public. They’re not sharing the source material, and the goal was never plagiarism. There was a period where it became coherent enough to get very close to plagiarism, but it’s been moving past that phase very quickly

Microsoft, especially with how they scraped private GitHub repos (and the things I’m sure Google and Facebook just haven’t gotten caught doing with private data) is way over the line for me. But I see that more as being bad stewards of private data - they shouldn’t be looking at it, their AI shouldn’t be looking at it, the public shouldn’t be able to see it, and they probably failed on all counts

Granted, I think copyright is a bullshit system. Normal people don’t get any protection, because you need to pay to play. Being unable to defend it means you lose it, and in most situations you’re going to spend way more on legal costs than you could possibly get back.

I also think the most important thing is that this tech is spread everywhere, because we can’t have one group in charge of the miracle technology… It’s too powerful.

Google has all the data they could need, they’ve bullied the web into submission… They don’t have to worry about copyright, they control the largest ad network and dominate search (at least for now).

It sucks that you can take any artist’s visual work, and fine tune a network to replicate endless rough facsimile in a few days. I genuinely get how that must feel violating.

But they’re going to be screwed when the corporate work dries up for a much cheaper option, and they’re going to have to deal with the flood of AI work… Copyright won’t help them, it’s too late for it to even slow it down

If companies did something wrong, have it out in court. My concern is that they’re going to pass laws on this that claim it’s for the artists, but effectively gatekeep AI to tech giants