"Without any legal right to do so" is for the courts to decide. And so far, the courts are very much not deciding the way you want them to.

"Fair use" counters "without license and without permission" hard. The argument that training AI on scraped data is "fair use" and the resulting model outputs are "transformative works" has held up in courts. Anthropic got dinged for downloading pirated books, but not for throwing the ones they didn't pirate down the training pipeline.

Some countries, like Japan, have amended their copyright laws to make AI training categorically legal. Others are in "fair use clauses" grey areas with courts deciding case by case based on precedent and interpretation. So trying to latch onto copyright law is, as it always was, the wrong move. Copyright never favored the small guy. Stupid to expect that it suddenly will.

> The argument that training AI on scraped data is "fair use" and the resulting model outputs are "transformative works" has held up in courts.

Nope. Nope. Nope. That has explicitly not been ruled on yet. Transformative means that you don't need a fair use defense. Anthropic has only gotten away with their outputs being called transformative so far because they put a dubiously effective filter in front to block the most egregious infringing outputs. No one has actually challenged this afaik.

Ideal for whom? For society in general, I don’t think so.

I think it would obviously better for society.

I think you may be placing too much value on the output of these machines which use tons of energy, generate pollution (both noise and chemical), and generate output that's worse then what a human can do. We would be better off if these LLMs didn't exist.

Average person in US reducing his/her meat intake by 1/4 would do much, much more for environment compared with completely scrapping entire AI infrastructure worldwide. For some reason people concerned with environmental impact of AI get really angry whenever I point this out.

The average person here would do more still by just taking one less flight. It's air travel that really blows individual emissions out of the water.

Would your ideal world apply to humans as well? Like if I see some art in a museum and it inspires me to create some of my own, I would need to pay a licensing fee to the original artist?

And what about the artists that inspired them? There is no art in the world that sprang fully formed from one single person, without any influences.

Should we reshape our economy to ensure knowledge and artistic provenance is maintained perpetually?

This whole discussion is so weird to me. It’s like AI has freaked everyone out so much that the instinct is to run to the safety of Disney-esque complete control and perpetual monetization of every work.

Which is exactly the opposite of how art worked for the first several hundred thousand years. Really, we want to double down on the perverse incentives and tight control that IP owners have given us in the past 50 years?

>Like if I see some art in a museum and it inspires me to create some of my own, I would need to pay a licensing fee to the original artist?

Nope, humans are admitted for free :).

>And what about the artists that inspired them? There is no art in the world that sprang fully formed from one single person, without any influences.

As long as you are a human you get to be inspired all you want :)

You seem very invested in licking the boot of the trillion dollar corporations. Your fellow humans are concerned.

>Really, we want to double down on the perverse incentives and tight control that IP owners have given us in the past 50 years?

Isn't it interesting that the EXACT second that copyright law impedes billion dollar corporations it is thrown out the window, really makes you think huh?