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This is your occasional reminder that generative "AI" in particular could have been developed on public domain materials and/or licensed and compensated works but the major players intentionally, methodically and systemically chose to steal labor from working creative folks instead

And an important addition: the theft is ongoing and constant, as they continue to train off these stolen works, off the distillation of the outputs of previous theft-based models, and so on. I think some folks think it's some "that's awful that happened but it's the past now". It's still happening.

And, as such, it must be stopped permanently going forward, retroactively compensated, and also any previous theft-based models destroyed, etc. That is not impossible. It is in fact far, far less of a demand than "let us steal the entirety of everyone's life work and data to wield against them"

Yes, distillation is the thing. They used web scraping as a lazy bootstrapping shortcut to avoid the type of data engineering that they actually do now in distillation. But it's all fruit from a poisoned tree.

Yes, I was very happy to see that language (and distilling as ongoing infringement) make it into a serious lawsuit finally this last month. Was thinking we'd have to wait until further down the line, but good to get it going already.