It’s much the same. Only authorized people are allowed to do X. Since X costs a lot of money, by definition it can’t be open source. There are no hobbyist pilots that carry passengers without a license, and if there are, they’re quickly told to stop. Generative AI faces a real chance of having the same fate. Which means open source will look similar to these planes trying to compete with commercial aircraft: https://pilotinstitute.com/flying-without-a-license/

If you can think of a better example, I’d like to know though. I’ll use it in future discussions. It’s hard to think of good analogies when the tech has new social effects.

If I fly a plane and crash, my passengers die. If I generate an image using a model whose training included some unlicensed imagery... Disney misses out on a fraction of a cent?

There is a real reason why some professions are licenced and others are not.

Your analogy is nonsensical. Not having a better one is irrelevant.

If training data requires licensing fees, ML practitioners will become a licensed field de facto, because no one in the open source world will have the resources to pursue it on their own.

Perhaps a better analogy is movies. At least with acting, you can make your own movies, even if you’re on a shoestring budget. With ML, you quite literally can’t make a useful model. There’s not enough uncopyrighted data to do anything remotely close to commercial models, even in spirit.

> If training data requires licensing fees, ML practitioners will become a licensed field de facto,

You know the word "license" has multiple, dissimilar meanings, right?