Bear with me here. Rushed and poorly articulated post incoming...
In the broadest sense, generative AI helps achieve the same goals that copyleft licences aim for. A future where software isn't locked away in proprietary blobs and users are empowered to create, combine and modify software that they use.
Copyleft uses IP law against itself to push people to share their work. Generative AI aims to assist in writing (or generating) code and make sharing less neccesary.
I argue that if you are a strong believer in the ultimate goals of copyleft licences you should also be supporting the legality of training on open source code.
The obvious difference is that copyleft is voluntary, while having your art style stolen isn't.
If an artist approached a software developer, created a painting of them using their Mac, and said "There, I've done your job for you" you'd think they were an idiot.
This is the same from the other side. The inability to understand why that's a realistic analogy does not change the fact that it is.
"> The obvious difference is that copyleft is voluntary, while having your art style stolen isn't."
This is why it is important whether you consider that infringement occurs upon ingestion or output. If it only matters for outputs, then artists have a problem, since copyright doesn't protect styles at all, see for example the entire fashion industry.
There is a saving grace though: Artists can make a case that the association of their distinctive style with their name is at least potentially a violation of trademark or trade dress, especially if that association is being used to promote the outputs to the public. This is a fairly clear case of commercial substitution in the market for creating new works in that artist's style and creating confusion concerning the origin of the resulting work.
Note that the market for creating new works in a particular artist's distinctive and named style kind of goes away upon the artist's passing. What remains is the trademark issue of whether a particular work was actually created by the artist or not, which existing trademark law is well suited to policing, as long as the trademark is defended, even past the expiration of the copyright.
Meanwhile, trademark (and copyright) also apply to the subjects of works, like Nintendo's Mario or Disney's Mickey Mouse or Marvel's Iron Man. But we don't really want models to simply be forbidden from producing them as outputs, or they become useless as tools for the purpose of parody and satire, not to mention the ability to create non-commercial fan art. The potential liability for violating these trademarks by publishing works featuring those characters rests with the users rather than the tools, though, and again existing law is fairly well suited to policing the market. Similarly, celebrities' right of publicity probably shouldn't prevent models from learning what they look like or from making images that include their likeness when prompted with their name, but users better be prepared to justify publishing those results if sued.
You can also make the (technical) argument that if you just ask for an image of Wonder Woman, and you get an image that looks like Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, that the model is overfitting. That's also the issue with the recent spate of coverage of Midjourney producing near-verbatim screenshots from movies.
It might be appropriate though to regulate commercial generative AI services to the extent of requiring them to warn users of all the potential copyright/trademark/etc. violations, if they ask for images of Taylor Swift as Elsa, or Princess Peach, or Wonder Woman, for example.
The majority of AI models out there (at least by popularity / capability) are proprietary; with weights and even model architectures that are treated as trade secret. Instead of having human-written music and movies that you legally can't copy, but practically can; you now have slop-generating models that live on a cloud server you have no control over. Artists and programmers who want to actually publish something - copyright or no - now have to compete with AI spam on search engines, while ChatGPT gets to merely be "confidently wrong" because it was built on the Internet equivalent of low-background metal - pre-AI training data. Generative AI is not a road that leads to less intellectual property[0], it's just an argument for reappropriating it to whoever has the fastest GPUs.
This is contrary to the goals of the Free Software movement - and also why Free Software people were the first to complain about all the copying going on. One of the things Generative AI is really good at is plagiarism - i.e. taking someone else's work and "rewriting it" in different words. If that's fair use, then copyleft is functionally useless.
It's important to keep in mind the difference between violating the letter of the law and opposing the business interests of the people who wrote the law. Copyleft and share-alike clauses have the intention of getting in the way of copyright as an institution, but it also relies on copyright to work, which is why the clauses have power even though they violate the spirit of copyright. Generative AI might violate the letter of the law, but it's very much in the spirit of what the law wants.
[0] Cory Doctorow: "Intellectual property is any law that allows you to dictate the conduct of your competitors"
Is FSF's stance on AI actually clear? I thought they were just upset it was made by Microsoft.
Creative Commons has been fairly pro-AI -- they have been quite balanced, actually, but they do say that opt-in is not acceptable, it should be opt-out at most. EFF is fairly pro AI too -- at least, against using copyright to legislate against it.
You shouldn't discount progress in the open model ecosystem. You can sort of pirate ChatGPT by fine tuning on its responses, there's GPU sharing initiatives like Stable Horde, there's TabbyML which works very well nowadays, and Stable Diffusion is still the most advanced way of generating images. There's very much of an anti-IP spirit going on there, which is a good thing -- it's what copyleft is there for in sprit, isn't it?
The Software Freedom Conservancy has been complaining about GitHub Copilot since 2022[0]. They specifically cite Copilot's use of training data in ways that violate the copyleft and attribution requirements of various FOSS licenses. Hector Martin (the guy porting Linux to MacBooks) also agrees with this. It's also important to note that the first AI training lawsuit was specifically to enforce GPL copyleft[1].
The EFF's argument has come across to me less like "AI is cool and good" and more like "copyright doesn't do a good job of protecting artists against AI taking their jobs". Cory Doctorow's also taken a similar position, arguing that unions are better at protecting against AI than copyright is. e.g. WGA being able to get contractual provisions preventing workers from being replaced with AI.
This is a different vein of opposition to AI from what we saw the following year in 2023 with artists and writers, though. Even then, those artists and writers aren't suddenly massively pro-copyright[2] and more consider it a means to fatally wound AI companies[3]. In contrast, big businesses that own shittons of copyright have been oddly quiet about AI. Sure, you have Getty Images and The New York Times suing Stability and OpenAI, but where's, say, Disney or Nintendo's litigation? These models can draw shittons of unlicensed fanart[4], and nobody cares. Wizards and Wacom made big statements against AI art, but then immediately got caught using it anyway, because stock image sites are absolutely flooded with it.
My personal opinion is that generative AI creates enough issues that we can't group them down into neat "pro-copyright" vs. "anti-copyright" arguments. People who share their work for free online are complaining about it while people who expect you to pay money for their work are oddly ambivalent. AI is orthogonal to copyright.
I will give you that the open model community is doing cool shit with their stolen loot. However, that's still something large corporations can benefit from (e.g. Facebook and LLaMA).
[3] Their actual argument against AI is based on moral grounds, not legal ones. I don't think any artist is going to accept licensing payments for training data, they just want the models deleted off the Internet, full stop.
[4] OpenAI tried to ban asking for fanart, but if you ask for something vaguely related (e.g. "red videogame plumber" or "70s sci-fi robot") you'll get fanart every time.
In the broadest sense, generative AI helps achieve the same goals that copyleft licences aim for. A future where software isn't locked away in proprietary blobs and users are empowered to create, combine and modify software that they use.
Copyleft uses IP law against itself to push people to share their work. Generative AI aims to assist in writing (or generating) code and make sharing less neccesary.
I argue that if you are a strong believer in the ultimate goals of copyleft licences you should also be supporting the legality of training on open source code.