I think it's a conflation of the ideas of what copyright should be and actually is. I don't tend to see many people who believe copyright should be abolished in its entirety, and if people write a book or a song they should have some kind of control over that work. But there's a lot of contention over the fact that copyright as it exists now is a bit of a farce, constantly traded and sold and lasting an aeon after the person who created the original work dies.

It seems fairly morally constant to think that something old and part of the zeitgeist should not be under copyright, but that the system needs an overhaul when companies are using your live journal to make a robot call center.

It's interesting as it's many of the MPAA/RIAA attitudes towards Napster/BitTorrent but now towards gen AI.

I think it reflects the generational shift in who considers themselves content creators. Tech allowed for the long tail to become profitable content producers, so now there's a large public audience that sees this from what's historically been a corporate perspective.

Of course, they are making the same mistakes because they don't know their own history and thus are doomed to repeat it.

They are largely unaware that the MPAA/RIAA fighting against online sharing of media meant they ceded the inevitable tech to other companies like Apple and Netflix that developed platforms that navigated the legality alongside the tech.

So for example right now voice actors are largely opposing gen AI rather than realizing they should probably have their union develop or partner for their own owned offering which maximizes member revenues off of usage and can dictate fair terms.

In fact, the only way many of today's mass content creators have platforms to create content is because the corporate fights to hold onto IP status quo failed with platforms like YouTube, etc.

Gen AI should exist in a social construct such that it is limited in being able to produce copyrighted content. But policing training/education of anything (human or otherwise) doesn't serve us and will hold back developments that are going to have much more public good than most people seem to realize.

Also, it's unfortunate that we've effectively self propagandized for nearly a century around 'AI' being the bad guy and at odds with humanity, misaligned with our interests, an existential threat, etc. There's such an incredible priming bias right now that it's effectively become the Boogeyman rather than correctly being identified as a tool that - like every other tool in human history - is going to be able to be used for good or bad depending on the wielder (though unlike past tools this one may actually have a slight inherent and unavoidable bias towards good as Musk and Gab recently found out with their AI efforts on release denouncing their own personally held beliefs).

I see way too many people advocating for copyright. I understand in this case it benefits big companies rather than consumers, but if you disagree with copyright, as I do, you should be consistent.

I'd say the main reason is companies are profiting off the work of others. It's not some grand positive motive for society, but taking the work of others, from other companies, sure, but also from small time artists, writers, etc.

Then selling access to the information they took from others.

I wouldn't call it a right wing position.

Yeah...it's pretty weird. Feels like some folks have really dived into LLMs regardless of ethics and will do any amount of hand waving to avoid criticism of a for-profit company openly attacking creatives' livelihood with their own uncompensated works. In an ideal world where it wasn't a case of "earn or die cold and alone in the streets", sure, but this is just robbing those workers of the fruits of their labor and burning the ladder while

I think the "neoliberal zeitgeist" thought may be correct as neoliberal ideology devalues anything and everything that is not solely profit-driven, including just about everything that humans have historically found to make life meaningful.

As an aside, when I browse TheGatewayPundit comments on AI articles, it is a lot more open, against legislation, and woke than I would expect!

Every single poster here has relied on disruptive technologies in their life. They don't even realize that they couldn't even make these arguments here if it was not for people before them pushing the envelope.

They don't know the history of their technology nor corporate law. If they did they would just roll their eyes every time an entrenched economic interest started saber rattling about the next disruptive technology that is going to steal their profits.

The posters here are the people who complained about horsewhip manufactures that were going out of business because of cars. They are ignorant and act like the few sound bytes they heard make them an expert.

It's important to recognize that IP is conceptually fucky to begin with. They're seeing what it's claimed to be (creator 'ownership' of their creations) rather than what it really is (corporations using the government to enact violence on non-violent people).

It means nothing interesting. The position they feel they're taking is "corporation bad" which is in line, they just haven't analyzed how IP works in the real world.