Sure but that applies to literally a million other things. There is an absolute ton of shit that companies do that individuals can’t which is still built off of others.

A company can go spend 1B on a new state of the art nuclear reactor which will bring in billions over it’s life time. Will the physicist who discovered the underlying math see any of the profit? No, probably not. And if they do it won’t be nearly a “fair share”. Nor will all the publishers and authors who generated the learning materials that the people working for said company used to build it.

There is tons of public knowledge that can only be utilized with a huge investment, that’s just how a lot of innovation works.

And OpenAI also has a ton of competitors. Sure they have the lead for now but thousands of other companies are also scraping and building LLMs.

Sure but they were competing against all sorts of other jobs by automating them.

You should have the discussions first.

But we are way past that. And legally while they are walking a thin line it seems that LLMs are going to win the legal challenges.

I don’t think stopping or slowing LLM development is going to work, because then more questionable countries who really don’t give a fuck about IP will pull ahead.

If you want my honest opinion I don’t think these LLMs companies are stealing and I do think artists are getting the shit end of the stick at the same time. We are heading towards and AI dystopia and I think the way to address is is through more solid social welfare programs instead of fight about IP. While artists are the focus, this AI revolution is coming for all labor. Artists are unfortunately the first ones being impacted by it.

I think people should stop fighting about the minor things and instead prep for the inevitable unemployment this will bring. LLMs are really just the tip of the iceberg.

“public” does not mean you’re allowed to steal it and republish it as a work of your own

That is not what they or LLMs do. And while there is questionable morals around it acting like they are straight up stealing and republishing work hurts having serious discussions about it.

This is more akin to rain water collection up-hill and selling it back to the people downhill

Not really, anyone can go and collect the same water they are collecting. And it’s happening, open source LLMs are quickly catching up and a shit ton of other companies are also crawling the exact same data.