I don't think people should be held liable for the misuse of tools they create, unless the tools were created for that purpose.

That's not something I can agree with.

Take image generation trained on a bunch of copyrighted photographs and artwork. What is the intent behind creating such a tool?

Yes, there is a stage where the software developer is building the software to do this purely operating on a "this is a cool hack" kind of mentality, but the point at which you make it available to other people, especially for payment, is when the liability becomes real.

Having worked on open source software for most of my life, I have always had to be aware of the issues surrounding copyright. That other software developers will write software and use copyright to proect it while ignoring the copyrights of others is deeply concerning. Copyright of software is no more or less important than copyrights applied to images and artwork.

Engineers are liable for their mistakes. At some point the same mechanisms may well need to be applied to software.

Software developers rarely have the power to say no to the people who sign their paychecks. If you do, you're speaking from a position of privilege that most don't share. Count yourself lucky rather than spewing hate on those whose lives are not as privileged as yours. Not everyone can go long periods of time without income, especially in the current labor market and doubly so if it is known that they're willing to say no to their employer.

Yeah I get that. But you gotta feel filthy. But I guess overtime those people become so desensitised to it they just dont feel it.

You have made a huge assumption that I have a steady income. I do not. I am currently in the middle of a fight with pole owners trying to get my company to survive having been denied timely access to poles for fully engineered permits. Loss over the last 7 years from delayed and denied access is in the millions. I could have settled things for hundreds of thousands, but there's no way to do that. I had to stop paying myself a paltry $25/hour to live off of last year when a creditor started squeezing as hard as possible.

Building FTTP networks is not expensive. It's the bullshit surrounding obtaining permission to install the fibre that is expensive.