alt Hacker News>I think the true mind boggle is you don't seem to realize just how much content the AI conpanies have stolen.
What makes you think I don't realize it? Looks like your comment was generated by an LLM because that was an hallucination that is Not true at all.
AI companies have stolen a lot of content for training. I AGREE with this. So have you. That content lives rent free in your head as your memory. It's the same concept.
Legally speaking though, AI companies are a bit more in the red because the law, from a practical standpoint, doesn't exactly make illegal anything stored in your brain... but from a technical standpoint information on your brain, a hard drive or a billboard is still information instantiated/copied in the physical world.
The text you write and output is simply a reconfiguration of that information in your head. Look at what you're typing. The English language. It's not copywrited, but every single word your typing was not invented by you, the grammar rules and conventions were ripped off existing standards.
I think you are pointing out the exact conflation here. The commentor probably didn't steal a bunch of code, because it is possible to reason from first principles and rules and still end up being able to code as a human.
It did not take me reading the entirety of available public code to be kind of okay at programming, I created my way to being kind of okay at programming. I was given some rules and worked with those, I did not mnemonic my way into logic.
None of us scraped and consumed the entire internet, is hopefully pretty obvious, but we still have capabilities in excess of AI.