Ben Werdmuller summarizes his post: "publishers are suing AI vendors, accusing them of theft. But are they giving the creators responsible for building their value a fair deal?" Against his Mastodon post I commented, "A large proportion - maybe even most - content read and used by AI was written for no commercial purpose at all, for free, by people just interacting on the Internet... We can't write rules that block people from normal interaction just because some writers & publishers put a toll on the road." I would go further to observe that journalists themselves do the same thing AI does - they record and draw from documents and events in the world, curating and interpreting them to help us understand. The journalist never talks about compensating their subjects; nobody treats it as 'theft' when a photographer records an accident scene. The ethics of all this are a lot more complex than "author write, AI steal". The same is true with respect to academic literature and learning resources.
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