I have trouble believing this argument is in good faith.
1) (minor nitpick) I don't see how HN is in the same category as GitHub or Stack Overflow.
2) "sometimes by license" or "free by license" imply you don't understand how copyright works. Code that is not accompanied by a license is proprietary. Period. [0] And if it has a license, then you have to follow it. If the license says that derivative works have to give credit and use the same license, then LLMs using that code for training and anything generated by those models is derivative and has to respect the license.
3) Arguably i didn't say this in the OP but the idea that the publisher owns copyright is absolutely nuts and only possible through extensive lobbying and basically extortion. It should be illegal. Copyright should always belong to the person doing the actual work. Fuck rent-seekers.
4) If western ML companies thought they can produce models of the same quality without for example stealing and laundering the entirety of Github, they would have. They don't so clearly GH is a very important input and its builders should either be compensated or the models and ML companies should only use the subset that they can without breaking the license.
Please don't get offended but I've seen this argument multiple times by proponents of A"I" and their entire argument hinged on the idea that the current ML models are so large that nobody can understand them and therefore a form of "intelligence" which they are clearly not (unless proven otherwise, at which point, they should get their own personhood but the fact no big ML company is arguing for that makes it obvious nobody really considers them intelligent).
1) (minor nitpick) I don't see how HN is in the same category as GitHub or Stack Overflow.
2) "sometimes by license" or "free by license" imply you don't understand how copyright works. Code that is not accompanied by a license is proprietary. Period. [0] And if it has a license, then you have to follow it. If the license says that derivative works have to give credit and use the same license, then LLMs using that code for training and anything generated by those models is derivative and has to respect the license.
3) Arguably i didn't say this in the OP but the idea that the publisher owns copyright is absolutely nuts and only possible through extensive lobbying and basically extortion. It should be illegal. Copyright should always belong to the person doing the actual work. Fuck rent-seekers.
4) If western ML companies thought they can produce models of the same quality without for example stealing and laundering the entirety of Github, they would have. They don't so clearly GH is a very important input and its builders should either be compensated or the models and ML companies should only use the subset that they can without breaking the license.
Please don't get offended but I've seen this argument multiple times by proponents of A"I" and their entire argument hinged on the idea that the current ML models are so large that nobody can understand them and therefore a form of "intelligence" which they are clearly not (unless proven otherwise, at which point, they should get their own personhood but the fact no big ML company is arguing for that makes it obvious nobody really considers them intelligent).
[0]: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can...