A free license, like the BSD, if followed, ensures that the unpaid creator of a free work is at least credited. Everyone using that work at the source code level sees the copyright notice with that author's name. The author has already given everyone the freedom to do anything with the code, except for plagiarism. AI is taking away the last thing from peoiple who have shared everything else.
Why is plagiarism an issue? In school it's an issue due to the effect that students won't learn well if they just copy everything, but outside of school and especially for personal use, why should I care if I "plagiarize" or not (and arguably AI doesn't even plagiarize as it's not a 1 to 1 copy paste of the code when making a new project)? The concept of plagiarism is as much a fiction as "intellectual" property. The only sort of property that actually exists is real and tangible.
For starters, because of the western values of giving credit.
We have diseases named after people, never mind inventions and ideas.
Plagiarism is kick-out-of-school grade academic misconduct, whereby you are pretending that someone's work (and the ability it implies) is your own.
> The only sort of property that actually exists is real and tangible.
Remember, I'm talking about works that are free to redistribute, use and even modify. Or in other cases, that the users to whom a compiled work is distributed have access to the buildable source code.
The authors put their names on it, and terms which says
that their notices are to be preserved when copies are made.
This isn't good enough for the Altmans and Amodeis of the world.
> it's an issue due to the effect that students won't learn well if they just copy everything
... and fraudulently obtain professional licensing, and use that to cause harm: medical malpractice, unsafe engineering.
None of what you said shows how it's an issue, beyond "it just is." Doctors for example "plagiarize" all the time, copying standardized diagnostic protocols, clinical notes from previous visits, and peer-reviewed treatment plans. The risk is in the information actually being wrong rather than them having "original" expression (which might even be worse, where they try some "novel" treatment and end up killing the patient). There is no fraud involved as the effects of plagiarism which is, again, a completely fictional issue.
I am also not sure why you keep bringing up Altman et al, I really don't give a shit what they are talking about, that is not what I am discussing. You for some reason keep trying to inject your views on these people when they are not relevant to the points I made which are about the theoretical concepts of machine learning and training, and its intersection with intellectual property. I am not interested in your opinions on these people, and they are not the only ones who stand to benefit from democratization of AI models and publishing of weights for the public.
Anyway, I think we both fundamentally have different views on the freedom of information and the fallacious nature of IP that cannot be changed online so I will bid you a good day and won't continue this conversation further, as I don't think it's productive for either of us.
Maybe it used to but with companies like Disney lengthening copyright times way beyond the original intention, or corporations patenting absurd things, it seems to be more of a way to entrench power than any sort of democratization. I'm glad generative AI seem to be bypassing all this and actually democratizing returns on the creative process, by flagrantly violating the concept of IP.
In the case of BSD-like licenses, IP is applied in a way that discourages plagiarism, while giving all the practical freedoms to the users, including making proprietary products.
In the case of copyleft licenses like GPL, IP is applied in a way to ensure that users have the code.
These things are taken away when the code is laundered through AI.
Again, start talking to people outside the field of programming and ask them how they like it when their labor of passion is "democratized" by AI turning it into unattributable slurry.
I don't really care how they like it because it's not up to them how I use the tools I want to use. It's literally the same argument photographers faced 100 years ago and in another 100 years I guarantee no one will be talking about AI in the terms you are today.
I don't see any issues with "appropriating" a work especially if it's not a one to one copy which AI does not produce (without out some pretzel level prompting), especially with regards to visual media (what even is appropriation in this case? Your example of photographers taking images of paintings is not the same as how AI training occurs). In other words, training is and should be free and fair use.
Of course the AI robber barons would that it be so, but it must not be and should not be.
Training gobbles up works in their entirety, verbatim.
Fair use of the verbatim words of a written work requires the excerpt to be small.
Fair use also usually requires attribution, which is missing.
Transformative works like parodies are also fair use, but the LLM isn't transformative int his sense; it's strawman transformative like a meat grinder.
Parodies use the structure of something existing, as a vehicle for original thought which is why they are protected from copyright claims by the authors of whatever is pariodied.
Again, IP is an outdated concept in this day and age. In all honestly there shouldn't even be the notion of fair use, any transformative work should be allowed. There is nothing about LLM training that isn't transformative, just as, well, grinding meat from a steak into stuffed sausages transforms it.
I'm not even talking about big corporations with proprietary models, in fact I oppose their not being open source or weight, I want more open models not fewer as that at least democratizes the value of LLMs. The worst case is having copyright hawks allowing regulatory capture by big AI corps by pushing regulations about licensing content, which, of course, no open model company will be able to afford in the future. I find that infinitely worse than having more lax copyright laws, where only a few corporations can tell you want to think via usage of their LLMs.
Lastly, no one can tell me from first principles why LLM training is bad, on the copyright side, other than, it just is, because copyright law dictates it so. Perhaps copyright law is what needs to be abolished, not LLMs.
"Transformative" has a specific meaning under the fair use doctrine. You can't just Rot13 or gzip someone's novel and call that transformative.
> Perhaps copyright law is what needs to be abolished, not LLMs.
Sure, now that it's inconvenient for some billionaires --- who themselves have nothing to protect, because everything they offer is a service the user can only access through the network, while they have a subscription.
I'm talking about the concept of transformation, not the specific legal language, which, again, I said is not worth discussing, because the legal concept of intellectual property is not useful.
No, not just now, since forever. I suppose Stallman being right all along is about this concept. And just to be clear, I'm not a supporter of current closed source AI companies, like I said I want to see open models succeed.
As I asked above, it really does look like no one can explain why LLM training is bad, besides saying it's bad. Therefore I will continue to reject IP as a concept.
Obviously, since you reject IP, presumably you would be okay to copy and paste code out of some GNU program into your own program, without attribution, and then, if you feel like it, release that program under the least restrictive terms possible (as close to the public domain as you could practically get away with).
So discussions revolving about doing so less directly through training a model just add distracting details that don't matter.
If everyone did that (due to there not being any rules against that), then fewer people would write programs under free licenses. Many such developers are volunteers, whose only payment is that the work product is theirs to license how they want.
Having that taken away from us is discouraging.
We haven't done anything to deserve such a "fuck you".
Even today, in 2026, it is possible to use photography in ways that infringe copyright! You literally cannot just snap your shutter over anything whatsoever and call it yours!
