The alternative are? the company that scrapes the web for a living or the one that scrapes github for a living?

you're forgetting one important alternative: to just not use and/or not do something. nobody asked them to scrape anything. nobody asked them to scrape copyrighted works. they could've just not done the shady thing, but they made that choice to do it, all by themselves. and one can just avoid using something with questionable data ethics and practices.

they clearly show in their actions that they think they can do anything with any data that's out there, and put it all out. why would anyone entrust them or their systems with own data to 'assist' with, I don't really get.

and even though it's an 'open source' project, that part may be just soliciting people to do work for them, to help them enable their own data collection. it's gonna run somewhere, after all. in the cloud, with monetized compute, just like any other AI project out there.

Would be interestingly to extend this criticism to the entire tech ecosystem which has been built on unsolicited scraping, which extends to many of the companies that are funding the company that hosts this very forum. we 'd get to a complete halt

Considering the benefit of a model that can be downloaded, and hopefully ran on-premise one day, i don't care too much about their copyright practices being imperfect, especially in this industry

I personally see your view on this as a complete and total failure on humans and society/culture actually work.

Your mind exists in a state where it is constantly 'scraping' copyrighted work. Now, in general limitations of the human mind keep you from accurately reproducing that work, but if I were able to look at your output as an omniscient being it is likely I could slam you with violation after violation where you took stylization ideas off of copyrighted work.

RMS covers this rather well in 'The right to read'. Pretty much any model that puts hard ownership rules on ideas and styles leads to total ownership by a few large monied entities. It's much easier for Google to pay some artist for their data that goes into an AI model. Because the 'google ai' model is now more culturally complete than other models that cannot see this data Google entrenches a stronger monopoly in the market, hence generating more money in which to outright buy ideas to further monopolize the market.

you bring up human mind as if that'd somehow explain, or excuse, or absolve how broken and poorly planned AI systems are, which, unlike human mind, memories, or thoughts, are very real, and operate with data, precise, definite and not uncertain in its existence, at every point of their actions. minds don't create a definitive list of every work they encounter, in precise detail, they don't create models that incorporate all of those works into a single entity with comprehensive accessibility, and don't enable others (thousands, millions, in hugely disproportional scale) to use those models, directly, to create yet more and more artifacts. all of these things are definite, tangible, transferrable data. minds are pretty much none of these things. but it doesn't matter what minds are, because it's about AI, and AI is a thing that exists, and it can and should be focused on in for its own merit. without sliding conversations into 'well, what about brains'. nothing about them. it's not about brains. it's about existing AI systems. don't slide.

licenses aren't limited to being 'only monetary', 'pay me to use this, otherwise, don't'. some licenses exist to enable distributing things freely, while offering protection of attribution and against misuse of things. (just check out CC licenses). it would be nice if those things would be respected, but they aren't, because there's no mechanism built in that'd discern the licenses, because they don't care. it is not just an attack on 'big bad commercial entities that hold copyrights on works', it's an attack on people who try to protect their works that they give for free, from misuse. those people who knowingly built systems that ignore any copyrights, any licensing, truly aren't the "good guys" who are "battling corporatist copyright systems", even though they'd probably very much like you to believe that, as they so desperately try to avoid being grilled on copyright issues.

You can only keep a genie bottled up for so long, and if you don't rub the lamp, your adversaries will.

With something as potentially destabilizing as AGI, realpolitik will convince individual nations to put aside concerns like IP and copyright out of FOMO.

The same thing happened with nuclear bombs: it's much easier to be South Africa choosing to dispose of them if you end up not needing them, than to be North Korea or Iran trying to join the join the club late.

The real problem is that the gains from any successes will be hoarded by the people who acquired them by breaking the law.

Yes, and it's up to each of us to decide how we feel about that. I personally don't think I have a problem with it, but then I've always been somewhat opposed to software patents and other IP protections.

I mean, the whole reason we have those laws is the belief that it encourages innovation. I can believe it does to some extent, but on the other hand, all these AI models are pretty innovative, too, so the opportunity cost of not allowing it is pretty high.

I don't think it's a given that slurping up IP like this is ethically or pragmatically wrong.

Building something interesting without being too worried about licensing and copyright is a positive signal in my mind.

You can clutch your pearls all you like but this is just the digital version of what humans have been doing forever. If information is accessible to the public then it will be accessed, that's how we work.