>I really don't like this--opt-out never works because the scale advantages are backwards. It places the burden in the wrong place. The aggregators should have to get opt-in.

>Look at YouTube. Because of "opt-out", lots of people monetize content that they have no right to and it's up to the original author to have to fight the scale of a zillion uploaders. Only the biggest entities can do that.

>YouTube (and everybody else) should have to assert "You, the uploader, own this content" when they ingest it. Nothing else works.

Thankfully, in a rare turn of fate, capital will be on the side of the laissez-faire instead of the stringent anti-copyright-infringers for once. You do not own the rights to material created by a generative AI.

One subtle benefit of the opt out is that it forces commercial ML companies to reveal what they trained on. So Copilot would need to reveal a list of repositories, in order to give the repo authors a chance to opt out.

This is a fairly big deal since right now there’s no incentive for AI companies to disclose their training data, and it seems unlikely that legislation to that effect will be enacted anytime soon. Whereas this opt out mechanism is already getting widespread adoption in the EU.