That's the best argument I've heard so far, but still doesn't make sense to me. It's not like your individual project is going to make any significant differenc

That's the best argument I've heard so far, but still doesn't make sense to me. It's not like your individual project is going to make any significant difference to the capabilities of the resulting AI that's "competing with you" one way or the other. So really all you'd be doing by not releasing your code is shooting yourself in the foot for no gain. Granted, people are not necessarily rational actors, so maybe you could argue it still makes sense to have some protections in place to assuage people's irrational fears. Maybe like some kind of robots.txt for determining whether a page can be used in an AI dataset could serve that purpose. I'd be hesitant to support anything more burdensome than that.