This is bigger than the greed of any group of people. This is a technological sea change that is going to displace and obsolesce certain kinds of work no matter where the money goes. Even if open models win where no single entity or group makes a large pile of money, STILL the follow-on effects from wide access to models trained on all public data will unfold.

People who try to prevent models from training on all available data will simply lose to people who don’t, and eventually the maximally-trained models will proliferate. There’s no stopping it.

Assume a world where models proliferate that are trained on all publicly-accessible data. Whatever those models can do for free, humans will have a hard time charging money for.

That’s the sea change. Whoever happens to make money through that sea change is a sub-plot of the sea change, not the cause of it.

If you want to make money in this new environment, you basically have to produce or do things that models cannot. That’s the sink or swim line.

If most people start drowning then governments will be forced to tax whoever isn’t drowning and implement UBI.

>Tough luck, then. You don’t have the right to shit on and harm everyone else just because you’re a greedy asshole who wants all the money

It used to be that property rights extended all the way to the sky. This understanding was updated with the advent of the airplane. Would a world where airlines need to negotiate with every land-owner their planes fly above be better than ours? Would commercial flight even be possible in such a world? Also, who is greediest in this scenario, the airline hoping to make a profit, or the land-owners hoping to make a profit?

Your comment seems unfair to me. We can say the exact same thing for the artist / IP creator:

Tough luck, then. You don’t have the right to shit on and harm everyone else just because you’re a greedy asshole who wants all the money and is unwilling to come up with solutions to problems caused by your business model.

Once the IP is on the internet, you can't complain about a human or a machine learning from it. You made your IP available on the internet. Now, you can't stop humanity benefiting from it.

AI will just be another tool that artists will use.

However the issue is that it will be much harder to make a career in the digital world from an artistic gift and personal style: one's style will not be unique for long as AI will quickly copy it and so make the original much less valuable.

There are alternative systems. One would be artists making a living through other ways such as live performances, meet and greet, book signings, etc.)

We could also do patronage. Thats how musicians used to be funded. Even today we have grants from public/private institutions.

We could also drift back into "owning the physical media" We see this somewhat with the resurgence of records.

NFTs would have been another way, but at least initially, it failed to become generally accepted into the popular conscious.

I'll gladly put money on music that a human has poured blood, sweat, tears and emotion into. Streaming has already killed profits from album sales so live gigs is where the money is at and I don't see how AI could replace that.

There is no way on Earth that people playing by the existing rules of copyright law will be able to compete going forward.

You can bluster and scream and shout "Nonsense" all you want, but that's how it's going to be. Copyright is finished. When good models are illegal or unaffordable, only outlaws -- meaning hostile state-level actors with no allegiance to copyright law -- will have good models.

We might as well start thinking about how the new order is going to unfold, and how it can be shaped to improve all of our lives in the long run.

I think there’s no stopping this train. Whoever doesn’t train on all available data will simply not produce the models that people actually use, because there will be people out there who do train models on all available data. And as I said in another comment, after some number of decades all of the content that has been used to train current models will be in the public domain anyway. So it will only be a few generations before this whole discussion is moot and the models are out there that can do everything today’s models can, unencumbered by any copyright issues. Digital content creation has been made mostly obsolete by generative AI, except for where consumers actively seek out human-made content because that’s their taste, or if there’s something humans can produce that models cannot. It’s just a matter of time before this all unfolds. So yes, anyone publishing digital media on the internet is contributing to the eventual collapse of people earning money to produce content that models can produce. It’s done. Even if copyright delays it by some decades, eventually all of today’s medial will be public domain and THEN it will be done. There are 0 odds of any other outcome.

To your last point, I think the best case scenario is open source/weight models win so nobody owns them.