That's not true. Copyright applies whether the author says so or not. By default, anything you find on the publicly accessible web, you are NOT free to reuse.

That's why the GenAI companies try to talk their way out by claiming training is "Fair Use". It means they acknowledge that the materials they use are copyrighted and not legal to reproduce without a license.

You can download it and re-upload it on your own site. And that would be an example for something that, in almost all cases, you wouldn't be allowed to do (unless the creator explicitly grants you permission).

I don't think the point is to just create as much content as possible, either. The term "content" alone implies lack of quality.

IMHO, any LLM output is, and systemically forever will be, inferior to human creative output, if not entirely worthless. We can scale and industrialise the production of slop, sure, but who wants that and to what end? We're not getting the next cultural movement or artistic masterpiece from these systems no matter how often we pull the lever of the regurgitation blender machine. Because human intent is the whole point, and without it, there is no reason to make any of this.

I agree that it should be about creating the most value to the consumer. As a consumer, the value I get out of LLM writing or art is almost always exactly zero, and it makes it that much more difficult for me to find the things I would see value in.

Then the natural born humans should also be liable for any criminal acts the corporations founded or run by them commit.

The fact that they don't is crucial, and probably the very reason why the concept of corporations was invented.

That's a lot of optimism about the quality of LLM summaries which, just going by my own experiences with them, I cannot share.

The part about collating all human knowledge also reminds me of the optimism on the early Internet. I miss having such a positive and hopeful outlook on things, but again, can no longer bring myself to truly believe it. Maybe I'm just getting too old.

What I see as the most likely scenario is that for most users, this collation of knowledge will remain behind the oligarch gatekeepers, who can and will manipulate the output to suit their interests.

I know, I know, open models and such, but I don't see those making any dents against the oligopolies. People will still go to Google or OpenAI. No non-nerd is going to self-host a niche model, and the on-device inference most people will be using will be based on models provided by the same, manipulative oligarchs.

The degrading of Google's search result quality is actually a good indicator that this are heading towards more manipulation rather than unfiltered access to real, original human knowledge.

How do you see a possibility of avoiding model collapse? It seems to me to be an unavoidable consequence of two facts I consider pretty much irrefutable:

1) LLM content can at best be as good as the source material it was trained on. That's the upper bound. "Out of distribution" output of LLMs is mostly unusable.

2) LLM-generated content increasingly drowns out original content, online and elsewhere.

This spells "monotonically decreasing content quality" to me.

I find Kinsella's argumentation extremely weak, and his defense of it (e.g. his AMA) entirely unconvincing. Unless you susbscribe to a number of very daring assumptions which, in my view, do not at all track with our reality, his ideas just don't hold up.

That being said, in this scenario of yours, how much of that additional work do you figure would be actually original? If someone wants to make a living with music, why bother learning an instrument and writing songs if nobody can stop them from just recording someone else and selling that?

That's really the heart of this lawsuit, isn't it? If we give freeloaders the right to legally monetise other people's work, we will drown in bland, derivative, stolen garbage and drive out the actual creators, in the process also breaking the "business model" of the freeloaders. A real lose-lose-lose situation which I see as much more realistic and believable than Kinsella's libertarian dream world.

Not much need for extrapolation, either. We can just watch it happen right now. "Content production" on the web is definitely exploding, as per your point. But even in the mainstream, most people will agree that this flood of new, LLM-generated "works" is worth less than the originals they're sloppy pastiches of.

And it gets less likely the longer each use is.

I also doubt this. When I observe people out in town, most of them stare at their phones non-stop. To get to pick them up that often, they'd first have to put them down every now and then.

Not all of us are past that. Touchscreens have a variety of downsides that I think most people simply don't think about too much and put up with, and physical keyboards a number of benefits that people aren't aware of because they've been out of fashion for so long.

Less on the device and more on the keyboard. On Android, you can install third-party keyboards like any other app, and there's a wide range in quality. The default Android one is decent, but not among the best.

I've been strictly a Sony Xperia user for almost 15 years now, and Sony had its own keyboard app early on, which they later discontinued. Swipe typing on the Xperia keyboard is still the fastest and most precise I've ever been able to write on a phone, nothing else ever came close. Then they stopped development and moved over to a Microsoft keyboard, I think. I've never found another keyboard that did swipe typing as well as Sony.