No, this is not true at all. A lot of things are put on the web with plenty of “restrictions on what for”. That’s why licenses exist. Creative Commons being an example of licenses with well defined limits on what you can and cannot do with the content.

Furthermore, a significant portion of content on the web was put there without permission: think piracy or revenge porn. AI systems have been trained on tons of pirated books.

> Since it's on the web, there really is an implied permission to use it privately for whatever you want.

There really is not. It’s just that if you’re using it privately then by definition no one else knows and thus no one can complain. It doesn’t mean that the creator condones whatever you’re doing.

> Some artists assume they have more rights than they really do and that other people aren't even allowed to mimic their style.

We’re not talking about “other people”. Another person mimicking your style is, to an extent, harmless because they’re also making a time investment to replicate your style. With the AI tools you can reproduce hundreds of knock offs in minutes.

We have to stop with this comparison of “what these AI systems are doing is fine because humans could also do it by hand”. It is not the same thing. Scale matters.

When something has a stated license, that only increases your rights to use it; the default is nothing allowed except fair use.

Copyright literally restricts using the material. If you buy a book, you cannot sell tickets to an event where you read it out loud.

Just because AI threatens to produce equally valuable material for much lower cost doesn't mean that's wrong. It just means those people got out-competed in the market. That's what the free market is for - to serve the consumers, not the producers.

For one, if you serve only the consumers at the detriment of the producers, soon you’ll have no producers left (or, more likely, a handful of extremely powerful ones which will stay stale as they have no reason to innovate).

For another, you appear to be arguing as if the “free market” is an unambiguous positive, when it very much is not. It doesn’t even adequately serve consumers, it serves businesses. The free market is what makes companies knowingly produce and sell harmful substances, like cigarettes or lead paint.

I'm not arguing free market is all positive, just pointing out that the whole reason people see free markets as a good thing is because they benefit people (consumers). They have downsides too but those aren't the reason they're popular. Nobody wants free markets so they can get poisoned more easily.

The reason everyone is irritated at the tech companies is not so much because they made it cheaper to do these things, but because they seem to have such a smarmy, slimy attitude about the whole thing - these comments by the Microsoft CEO of AI as a prime example. They could have just trained their models on old public domain content, Wikipedia, or a million other things, but instead they want to justify raiding content that was shared for free under different expectations. This is only going to result in a locked-down, paywalled web that is pretty much the opposite of 90s net values.

If I use a reversed Jay-Z sample in my music, I will still get sued. This is just a couple of orders of magnitude higher abstraction.

However, if the model really can't regenerate its training data no matter how hard you try, then that would be fine too. I don't think anyone can really guarantee that now so that might be a problem, but it isn't necessarily a problem.

Nope, copyright applies just like it always does.