Something can be illegal and it can be technically legal but at the same time pretty damn bad. There is the spirit and the letter of the law. They can never be in perfect agreement because as time goes bad guys tend to find new workarounds.

So either the community behaves, or the letter becomes more and more complicated trying to be more specific about what should be illegal. Now that GPL is trivially washed by asking a black box trained on GPLed code to reproduce the same thing it might be inevitable, I suppose.

> They're still tools ~anyone can use

Of course, technology itself is not evil, just like crypto or nuclear fission. In this case when we are discussing harm we are almost always talking about commercial LLM operators. However, when the technology is mostly represented by that, it doesn't seem required to add a caveat every time LLMs are mentioned.

There's hardly a good, truly fully open LLM that one can actually run on own hardware. Part of the reason is that hardly anyone, in the grand scheme of things, even has the hardware required.

(Even if someone is a techie and has the money and knows how to set up a rig, which is almost nobody on grand scale of the things, now big LLM operators make sure there are no chips left for them.)

So you can buy and own (and sell) a car, but ~anyone cannot buy and run an independent LLM (and obviously not train one). ~everyone ends up using a commercial LLM powered by some megacorp's infinite compute and scraping resources and paying that megacorp one way or another, ultimately helping them do more of the stuff that they do, like harming OSS.