alt Hacker NewsThis claim of contradiction has never worked for me.
Let say person A wants everyone to be rich.
Person B plots a plan to make themself rich and everyone else poorer.
One can make an argument that any action by A is now a contradiction. If they work with B, it makes a lot of people poorer and not richer. If they work against B, B do not get rich.
However this is not a contradiction. If a company use training data in ways that reduce and harm other peoples ability to access information, like hiding attribution or misrepresenting the data and sources, people who advocate for free information can have a consistent view and also work against such use. It is not a shift. It is only a shift if we believe that copyright will be removed, works will be given to the public for free, and companies will no longer try to hide and protect creative works and information.
You can certainly argue second-order effects (ie. we have to restrict information to save information), but the movie studios were making that same argument at the time:
> If copyright can no longer protect the distribution of the work they produce, who will invest immense sums to create films or any other creative material of the kind we now take for granted? Do the thieves really expect new music and movies to continue pouring forth if the artists and companies behind them are not paid for their work?
--Jack Valenti, Motion Picture Association of America, 2000 (https://archive.is/PBy7C)
It sounds remarkably similar to what people concerned about AI say today. How do we make sure that artists get paid?
I don't think many hackers found the argument compelling at the time.