When I write code, what I write and how I write it is informed by having read countless source code …

Scale and the ability to generate a livelihood of your creations and/or the ability to control how what you have created is used, for instance, to demand attribution.

The attitude is derived from a general animus many have towards AI companies. They resent the efficacy of AI because it devalues individual expertise. I can't imagine it really justifiable to say that training off data is the same as "stealing", when that same claim, that learned information that a person could retain and reproduce constitutes copyright infringement is the subject of many dystopian narratives, like this one, where once your brain is uploaded to the cloud you have to pay royalties based on every media product you remember. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E

For another human being to look at my open source code, learn from it, get inspired by it, appreciate what I did, and let it influence their own creativity would bring me joy. That's why I open sourced it in the first place. Few people ever actually read open source code, but I'd like to think on the rare occasions they do, they share a connection with the author. I know when I read somebody else's code, for me to understand it I have to be thinking about the problem the same way they were when they wrote it. I feel empathy with them and can sometimes picture the struggle, backtracking, and eureka moments they went through to come up with their solution. Somehow I don't get the same warm fuzzy feelings about a machine powered by investor money ingesting my work automatically, in milliseconds, and coldly compressing it down to a few nudges on a few weights out of trillions of parameters. …

Humans should have more legal privileges than machines, just as individuals should have more legal privileges than corporations. It's really as simple as that. I don't want to gripe around making up justifications, that's how the law should be and if it turns out not to be that, I'm going to be nettled. I live in the UK, and most US law is based upon English common law, it's not some immutable code given to us from above. It's based upon assumptions and capabilities of the entities participating in the system at the time the law was codified. It can and should change to make more sense if those assumptions and capabilities shift massively.

The tool author having no claim on the output is exactly right and the piece agrees with that. Anthropic does not claim ownership of your outputs under the commercial terms, they assign them to you. The authorship question runs between you and the public domain, not between you and Anthropic. The piece's argument is that if the output lacks sufficient human authorship, nobody owns it, including you, which is a different problem from Anthropic claiming it.

> When I write code, what I write and how I write it is informed by having read countless source code files over my education and my career. Just as I ingest all that experience to fine-tune how my later code is written, so does the LLM from the code it's seen. You are presumably human. We have granted humans specific exemptions in copyright law. We have not granted that to LLMs. Why are we so eager to?

In many of those examples, there is payment to the creator of the works that others are learning from. Authors are paid for their books, when we listen to music on the radio the musician is paid royalties, etc. When you lead a team and mentor junior engineers you're being paid for your time. The nature of the source material matters though. Training a model on open source software seems perfectly fair - it has explicitly been released to the public, and learning from the code has never been a contested use. IMO the questions around coding models should be seen as less about LLMs and more as a subset of the conversation about large companies driving immense profits from the work of volunteers on open-source projects, i.e. it's more about open source than AI.

You’re confusing yourself with a commercial product. You’re not a product that was created by other human beings based on someone else’s IP.