alt Hacker NewsThat already didn't happen, regardless of AI. The thing about freely sharing knowledge is that people take that knowledge and use it to build further knowledge that helps you.
You might say that the fact LLMs are being provided as services by big techs invalidate that. But some people taking the provided knowledge for themselves has also always happened. More importantly, though, is that big tech provided LLMs aren't the only way to access the technology. Open weights and local models exist.
Casting this as “knowledge” betrays a very fundamental lack of knowledge about how LLMs work, or a desire to mislead for whatever reason.
They are not databases of facts. Even if they were, that would still constitute a very serious violation. They aren’t, and they’re not particularly good at serving that function either.
No, LLMs are capable of reproducing things (text, art, other media) based on their training data. Consider being an artist who produced something original that somehow made it into that training set - your chances of actually making a living are now vastly smaller.
The result is the same as if there was no copyright at all: Big companies will just exploit whoever, no art would be produced.
This is a huge issue, and there needs to be a reckoning.