Ars comments, in general, are hilariously bad.

It's surprising to me, because you'd think a site like Ars would attract a generally more knowledgable audience, but reading through their comment section feels like looking at Twitter or YouTube comments -- various incendiary and unsubstantial hot takes.

I'm "pro-copyright" in that I want the corporations that setup this structure to suffer under it the way we did for 25+ years. They can't just ignore the rules they spent millions lobbying for when they feel it's convinient.

On the other end: while copyright has been perverted over the centuries, the goal is still overall to protect small inventors. They have no leverage otherwise and this gives them some ability to fight if they aren't properly compensated. I definitely do not want it abolished outright. Just reviewed and reworked for modern times.

In all fairness, the essence of it doesn't have to do anything with copyright. "Pro-copyright" is old news. Everyone knows these companies shit on copyright, but so do users, and the only reason why users sometimes support the "evil pro-copyright shills" narrative is because we are bitter that Facebook and OpenAI can get away with that, while common peasants are constantly under the risk of being fucked up for life. The news is big news only because of "anti-ChatGPT" part, and everyone is a user of ChatGPT now (even though 50% of them hate it). Moreover, it's only big news because the users are directly concerned: if OpenAI would have to pay big fine and continue business as usual, the comments would largely be schadenfreude.

And the fact that the litigation was over copyright is an insignificant detail. It could have been anything. Literally anything, like a murder investigation, for example. It only helps OpenAI here, because it's easy to say "nobody cares about copyright", and "nobody cares about murder" sounds less defendable.

Anyway, the issue here is not copyright, nor "AI", it's the venerated legal system, which very much by design allows for a single woman to decide on a whim, that a company with millions of users must start collecting user data, while users very much don't want that, and the company claims it doesn't want that too (mostly, because it knows how much users don't want that: otherwise it'd be happy to). Everything else is just accidental details, it really has nothing to do neither with copyright, nor with "AI".

> but in a way that helps common people

That’ll be the day. But even if it does happen, major AI players have the resources to move to a more ‘flexible’ country, if there isn’t a loophole that involves them closing their eyes really really tight while outsourced webscrapers collect totally legit and not illegally obtained data

My favourite comment:

>> Wang apparently thinks the NY Times' boomer copyright concerns trump the privacy of EVERY @OpenAI USER—insane!!! -- someone on twitter

> Apparently not having your shit stolen is a boomer idea now.