> the largest theft of intellectual property in human history. Every digitised creative work, whether in the public domain or not was taken, often outright pirated, with the explicit intention of being able to trivially produce compelling forgeries

Is it theft?

Does knowledge belong to a person, or to the civilization? After all, their knowledge could not have come from nothing, as they too stand on the shoulders of giants - all of us do.

If we took the different route - opening knowledge up instead of focusing on gatekeeping - we'd probably allow people to achieve more.

Multiple times I've hit the gate when it was not necessary. Just yesterday: - Want to read a research paper? Pay up. - Want to access tax funded satellite images? Pay up. - Want to dig through some old parts of the public archives? Pay up. - Want to read an old publication that might contain knowledge, written for the public, which somehow ended up in a collection that requires you to pay up just so you can read 1 paragraph from a 188 paperbck or verify a certain catalogue number exists? Well well, open up your wallet.

In which case are we talking about theft?

Someone's NYT bestselling novel? Those are mostly so cookie cutter it ain't hard to copy them without an AI.

Music? How many times have musicians riffed and ripped off of one another? And now someone can just more easily create a similar song/tune.

Art? You cannot copy a physical art piece. You can reproduce it, but you cannot copy it - it won't have the same value as the original. Even in cases such as Warhol's mass produced art, the original prints have much more value than a random print on a dollar store t-shirt.

And after all, even Google and Open AI are sharing their models for free. You can use Gemini and ChatGPT without paying a dime to any of them. And they are also so kind to share the knowledge on how to build these magic machines AND even give you their machines for free so you can train one of your own.

So I wouldn't call all of this "the largest theft", more like "the largest liberation".