alt Hacker NewsThe article repeatedly treats license and contract as though they are the same, even though the sidebar links to a post that discusses the difference.
A lot of it boils down to whether training an LLM is a breach of copyright of the training materials which is not specific to GPL or open source.
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To my understanding, if the material is publicly available or obtained legally (i.e., not pirated), then training a model with it falls under fair use.
Once training is established as fair use, it doesn't really matter if the license is MIT, GPL, or a proprietary one.
It's not specific to open source but it's most clearly enforceable with open source as there will be many contributors from many jurisdictions with the one unifying factor being they all made their copyright available under the same license terms.
With proprietary or more importantly single-owner code, it's far easier for this to end up in a settlement rather than being drug out into an actual ruling, enforcement action, and establishment of precedence.
That's the key detail. It's not specific to GPL or open source but if you want to see these orgs held to account and some precedence established, focusing on GPL and FOSS licensed code is the clearest path to that.
A GPL license is a contract in most other countries. Just not US probably.
And the current norm that the trillion dollar companies have lobbied for is that you can train on copyrighted material all you want so that's the reality we are living in. Everything ever published is all theirs.