Honestly, that's one thing that makes me optimistic about the current AI omnishambles: we now have ALL THE MONEY aggressively incentivized towards weakening IP

Honestly, that's one thing that makes me optimistic about the current AI omnishambles: we now have ALL THE MONEY aggressively incentivized towards weakening IP protections, because it stands to sabotage their big bubble in trained model systems. As someone who'd love to see the whole blasted IP paradigm flattened from orbit, I couldn't be happier. One of my many problems with IP as a whole was that it creates a metadata burden: you have to be very aware of what your source material is, who owns it, and under what terms they offer it, because there's always the risk you're pulling in enough material to create a risk of legal action. This was always a risk for scalability, but it was easy to pooh-pooh for human-made productions. "If you write the Great American Novel/Codebase, you can always hire a few lawyers to manage clearance or redaction as necessary." A human probably has a modest possible pool of source material to work with. The typical developer hasn't read everything on GitHub so there's little risk of incidental infringement against 99.99% of the projects. In contrast, the current nature of GenAI is explicitly a product with tens and hundreds of millions of pieces of source material, and there's no way to negotiate clearances on that scale on an individual, human-centric way. Hopefully, what we'll get out of it is the mechanism for large scale mandatory licensing. OpenAI might pay a kajillion dollars to keep their models online, but the same tools might be available for someone who just wants to create smaller scale derivative works without having to fight with some author's estate who considers it a personal affront.