> If you put stuff out in public for anyone to use, then find out it's used in a way you don't like, it's your right to stop sharing
Yes. The entire point of Copyright and the reason it was invented is to ensure people will keep sharing things. Because otherwise people will just stop publishing things, which is a detriment to all. (Including AI companies, who now don't get new training data)
We have collectively decided that we will give authors some power to say "I don't like how my work is being used" to ensure they don't just "stop sharing".
Fair Use is an exception to that, where the public good does outweigh an individual author's objections. But critically, not such that authors stop publishing. Hence the 4th "factor" in US copyright law (which is one of the most expansive on fair use), where the "effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work" is evaluated. Fair use isn't supposed to obliterate the value of the original work, or people will stop publishing again.
This is what makes AI training's status so contentious. In terms of direct copyright it is a very weak case. It is incredibly hard to prove a direct 1:1 copy from AI training data into the model and into the output, you have to argue about the architecture of LLMs, and it's incapability of separating copyrightable expressions from uncopyrightable facts.
Yet in spirit, AI training clearly violates copyright. The explicit stated purpose is to copy the works for training data, oft without any compensation or even permission, in order to create a machine that will annihilate the market for all works used.
People already are pulling back on the amount of works they share.
Nope. Copyright is a thing, licenses are a thing. Both are completely ignored by LLM companies, which was already proven in court, and for which they already had to pay billions in fines.
Just because something is publicly accessible, that does not mean everybody is entitled to abuse it for everything they see fit.
...the same courts that ruled that AI training is probably fair use? Fair use trumps whatever restrictions author puts on their "licenses". If you're an author and it turned out that your book was pirated by AI companies then fair enough, but "I put my words out into the world as a form of sharing" strongly implied that's not what was happening, eg. it was a blog on the open internet or something.
No. Reading something, learning from it, then writing something similar, is legal; and more importantly, it is moral. There is no violation here. Copyright holders already have plenty of power; they must not be given the power to restrict the output of your brain forever more for merely having read and learnt. Reading and learning is sacred. Just as importantly, it's the entire damn basis of our profession!
If you do not want people to read and learn from your content, do not put it on the web.
People getting better at writing is only going to increase the quality of the output.
Increasing both competition and tooling (by providing every writer with the world's greatest encylcopedia/thesaurus/line-editor/brainstormer/planner/etc) is only going to make writers better.
Will there be lots of people who misuse the system? Are there lots of people who use thesaurus words without knowing what they're talking about? Can't you tell the difference?
I see in LLMs a lowering of the ground floor making it easier for people to get in. This will increase the total availability of content.
I also see in LLMs a raising of the top bar making it harder to be the best. If more people are writing and more people are trying to be the best, the best is going to get better.
Consider chess. Have we suddenly stopped playing chess now that a phone can beat 95+% of people? No. The market is stronger than ever and still growing. The greatest player in the world use the chess algorithms to refine their play and the play keeps expanding in new and interesting ways.
In both writing and chess, yes, there is an explosion of low and middling play. But since when have we not always had people producing content and playing chess that when compared to the masters of the field is generally viewed as substandard?
But here's the kicker. Some people's favorite genre is badly editted fanfic. Some people genuinely derive actual pleasure from things that you or I might call garbage. And what's wrong with that? Who am I to say that you can't love clutzy firecop loves suburban housewife paperbacks? Or Zelda/Harry Potter crossfics or whatever.
Fair use is part of "copyright and licensing laws".
What it the model then creates a virtual actor that is very close to the real actor?
"Likeness" is a separate concept from copyrights
But instead we've got people posting "honey pots" that an LLM will immediately detect and route around.