The license only has force because of copyright. For better or for worse, the courts decide what is transformative fair use.
Characterizing the discussion behind this as "sophistry" is a fundamentally unserious take.
For a serious take, I recommend reading the copyright office's 100 plus page document that they released in May. It makes it clear that there are a bunch of cases that are non-transformative, particularly when they affect the market for the original work and compete with it. But there's also clearly cases that are transformative when no such competition exists, and the training material was obtained legally.
OK, so what's the status in your country? What lawsuits have been filed, and what are the findings?
There's a huge political aspect here: copyright hasn't worked for decades (I've written about this at length), and this is the latest iteration in that erosion. Countries that enforce IP as a natural right are going to have trouble navigating the change: they either need to avoid AI entirely (this will have higher costs than many anticipate), or they need revise how they think about copyright. Or they can just ignore it. There are no good options.
My instinct is that countries that embrace change will do better.
> Characterizing the discussion behind this as "sophistry" is a fundamentally unserious take
What a joke. Sorry, but no. I don't think is unserious at all. What's unserious is saying this.
> and the training material was obtained legally
And assuming everyone should take it at face value. I hope you understand that going on a tech forum and telling people they aren't being nuanced because a Judge in Alabama that can barely unlock their phone weighed in on a massively novel technology with global implications, yes, reads deeply unserious. We're aware the U.S. legal system is a failure and the rest of the world suffers for it. Even your President routinely steals music for campaign events, and stole code for Truth Social. Your copyright is a joke that's only there to serve the fattest wallets.
These judges are not elected, they are appointed by people whose pockets are lined by these very corporations. They don't serve us, they are here to retrofit the law to make illegal things corporations do, legal. What you wrote is thought terminating.
What I wrote is an encouragement to investigate the actual state of the law when you're talking about legal topics. That's the opposite of thought-terminating.
All licenses rely on the power of copyright and what we're still figuring out is whether training is subject to the limitations of copyright or if it's permissible under fair use. If it's found to be fair use in the majority of situations, no license can be constructed that will protect you.
Even if you could construct such a license, it wouldn't be OSI open source because it would discriminate based on field of endeavor.
And it would inevitably catch benevolent behavior that is AI-related in its net. That's because these terms are ill-defined and people use them very sloppily. There is no agreed-upon definition for something like gen AI or even AI.
Browsing this from a CM5 powered Hackberry Pi - a device not on-topic despite being a handheld deck - the problem is I'm running Linux, and these discussions seem more retro-focused on WinCE. Fewer forums for modern HPC than I'd like. Should probably host one.
For me: it's a way to access services I host on my homelab LAN from 3000 miles away. Having a router that automatically logs into that and routes TS addresses properly allows you to use all your devices connected to that router to access TS services with no further configuration. I host Kiwix, Copyparty, Llama.cpp, FreshRSS, and a bunch of other services on my homelab, and being able to access all of those remotely is convenient.
I'm not sure there's a dichotomy. I travel for a week at a time across the country, and bring only a backpack that fits under the seat on the airplane. But there's a GL.iNet router in that bag, since it gives all my devices Mullvad + Tailscale. Good use of space in my opinion, since I can access all the services I host from my home 3000 miles away with zero extra config.
There might be a bit of growth-hacking resistance here, and maybe some StackOverflow culture as well. Neither should be leveled at you, IMHO. I've followed and admired your work since Datasette launched, and I think you're exhibiting remarkably good judgment in how you discuss topics with links to deeper discussion, and it's in keeping with a long tradition of good practices for the web. Thanks for working to normalize the practice.
Counterpoint to the sibling comment: posting your own site is fine. Your contributions are substantial, and your site is a well-organized repository of your work. Not everything fits (or belongs) in a comment.
I'd chalk up the -4 to generic LLM hate, but I find examples of where LLMs do well to be useful, so I appreciated your post. It displays curiosity, and is especially defensible given your site has no ads, loads blazingly fast, and is filled with HN-relevant content, and doesn't even attempt to sell anything.
The point is AI has lots of useful applications, even though there's also lots of detestable ones.
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