> What happened to “information wants to be free?”

It was 1 part of an observation of opposed forces. “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”[1]

Some people removed the context and used it to say most information should be available to all. LLMs are information.

You thought this question proved what?

[1] https://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/Info_free_story.html

I interpreted it to mean people feel as though they didn’t consent to having their information trained on, because for many folks, they published articles, open source projects, etc. assuming that they were only helping other people. It’s quite a shock to see megacorps use such data to create machines which threaten the livelihoods of the original authors themselves.

Also, much of the data used to train LLMs are not strictly public domain. For example, copyrighted books and source code with attribution-requiring licenses feature heavily in many corpuses. There are still pending lawsuits against the labs here, yet they continue to push forward. It’s no surprise that there is popular demand for redistribution.

Individuals have faced federal charges and served prison time for reselling copyrighted content. I don't see the same happening to AI execs.

Are you proposing the Aaron Schwartz treatment by the government for Zuckerberg, Altman, and Amodei?

Yes. Took. As in: without permission. Didn't ask before hand, didn't provide a way to opt-out (although that would also be problematic), didn't ask for volunteers. Took.