As someone who used to pirate a shitton of stuff and holds copyright law in contempt, I fucking hate AI more than the copyright maximalists.

... then again, copyright maximalists REALLY LIKE AI for some reason, even though it's ripping off their property.

"Ripping off" is also doing some heavy lifting, because the judge in the Anthropic lawsuit bent over backwards to keep AI training legal - or so it seems. All the money Anthropic is paying out is for running an internal shadow library, not training books on that library. What makes this judgment palatable to the lawyers is that while AI is stealing a lot of art, it's not imperiling the copyright monopoly. Copyright is a tool that gives artists a monopoly on copies of their individual work, it does not protect artists as a class from competition from non-artists using machines. In other words, the courts are saying, "We know a lot of theft is going on, but we need you to draw the line from a specific individual work to a specific copy".

Patents were invented in Venice to break the power of medieval guilds by making workers trade their collective control over the economy for individual rights to specific inventions only. Copyright was invented by the British crown to reimpose censorship control over printing presses, but it's adoption into American law was based around individual property rights, and thus it has the same problems that, say, Italian patent law has. Namely that it is an artifice to turn a workers right to their labor into a piece of capital that can be traded around like a stock.

This imperils the legal argument against AI training, because the only theft property law recognizes is individual infringements upon individualized property rights. The legal argument against AI training is very collectivist: AI takes a microscopic chunk of every book in existence to create a machine that replaces artists. But copyright only protects the art from copying. Artists are legally unprotected from being copied, and furthermore, the framework of individual property rights that copyright runs on would cause immediate problems if we let anyone individually own the practice of art.

Furthermore, as someone who is part of this "hacker" community, I would like to point out that AI is arguably more corrosive to our norms than to artists' norms. What AI is being used for is primarily satisficing - the practice of giving "good enough" answers, without any of the personal understanding that this community runs on. The ongoing wave of AI-slop decompilations are particularly bad. The assumption with a retro game decompilation is that you take the game apart and learn how it works. The journey is as important as the destination, but when you use AI for this you skip the journey and make the destination pointless.

Of course, management loves this, because their goal is purely to sell you the destination.

There is a parallel set of concerns being voiced by artists, too: that the artistic process is as valuable if not moreso than the actual work product. The underlying principle in both fields is that the labor end wants to learn and develop their craft, while the capital end doesn't care because craft isn't something they can excludably own and trade. We can even see this in the Piracy Wars of yester-decade, or how book publishers and artists react to libraries. Publishers were way more opposed to piracy than artists were, and even moreso for libraries where there's a lot of artists that swear by them as a sales mechanism. The reason why this is the case is that artists can at least theoretically leverage exposure gained from distribution that does not pay them to create more of a market for their work tomorrow. But publishers can't do that - they only buy works from artists and sell them to the public, so once something is in a library or a BitTorrent tracker, it's largely "done" to them.

Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI