I think your issue is believing that Imaginary Property rights exist at all (especially since you’re basically advocating for software patents with this: “ It may have no lines of code in common with Illustrator, but everything it has was taken from code that someone wrote.”). Heck, how is a human supposed to learn in your view then?
If they get no attribution and have no financial incentive, why should a person create anything? You can wish for a world without property rights, but we live in a world where there are property rights. The question therefore isn't whether the vacuuming of license-based IP violates your personal belief system or not, it's whether laws were broken or not.
This leaves us in a situation where some people can break laws and become enormously, almost infinitely wealthy, whereas other people cannot. And that is intolerable.
For example: I was a taxi driver in 2001 and I had a great idea. What if I started a company that gave people rides for money, with an SMS-based "app" that worked on a flip phone? I started coding it. The only trouble was, that would have been completely illegal. But when someone showed up with a bunch of VC and started doing it, regardless of the law, suddenly we entered a two-tiered world where I (as a cab driver) had to pay to be licensed and undergo inspections and be patrolled by a special taxi police force, whereas they didn't. And I couldn't change my prices to compete.
Now we've gone another level. Imagine I tell Claude to code me a backend and app that's a clone of Uber, and I distribute it to all the Uber drivers. Do you think, for one second, that I would be allowed to operate that business in the wild-west fashion that Uber operated when they started up? Or Airbnb?
Whether you like property rights or not, laws were broken in the training of LLMs, and the net result is a much less level playing field in which the property rights have now essentially all been coalesced into closed models which you have to pay to query. What was once created freely is now owned by Anthropic in the form of Claude, and charged for.
My contention is that this is a much more unequal situation than one in which every author owns, for a time, the right to profit from their own work or to gain recognition by attribution.
There are licenses which allow you to use open-source work, with attribution.
There’s a reason why so many concepts in the sciences are named after somebody. Usually it’s the discoverer.
I’ve got no idea what this implies about learning for humanity as whole, though.
Why is the argument "well it's fine when a human does it". It's not a human, or a living being, or even concious. It's software operating in our social plane (language) owned by a bunch of yahoos in the bay. They are lining their pockets reselling ideas from books they burned..not sure they should be given the same grace a lone individual reading Adobe's source code line by line.
It’s technology built, funded, and used by humans, so of course it’s fine to me. The rest just reads as a the usual political rant against the rich, which I simply couldn’t care less about if I tried.
> Heck, how is a human supposed to learn in your view then?
In your view then, it would be entirely legal for me to torrent all the movies in the world as long as I say it's "to learn"?