There are those who believe that the way in which AI systems have been trained constitutes theft. There are others who say that public data was fair game to ingest since it was public. What nobody disagrees on: the data was used to train systems without the explicit consent of the authors.
There are ideologies and science fiction alike that believe that everything created by any human ought to immediately transfer into the public domain, share-and-share-alike. Today’s society hasn’t yet reached that pinnacle of the commons, and so copyright and private ownership of one’s own works prevail.
However, never before have we had such ambiguity about where the skills and ideas and intent of the creator ends and the synthesis of all that came before begins. We are in interesting times.
It seems though, that logically, if a tool synthesises as much of humanity’s collected knowledge as its creators could ingest to train it, then the moral obligation on the user of that tool is to return the output to the collective.
For software, the conclusion is that there ought to be no other software than open source. And further, if open source software becomes as convenient, as reliable, as easy-to-adopt, and as secure as proprietary software, then the only differentiator between open source and proprietary becomes: trust. Finally, if trust is final differentiator, who will you trust more: the vendor whose code is open source that you or others can scrutinise and verify, or the vendor who chooses to keep theirs private?