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Aaron Williamson@copiesofcopies@social.coop

Open source lawyer. Budding entrepreneur. Transformative Justice facilitator. Effing the ineffable.

Pronouns: eh/hem Joined: 2026-10-18 05:22:24 2 notes, 0 following, 0 followers

Reply to @bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org Aaron Williamson@copiesofcopies@social.coop (2026-10-16 22:37:48) @bkuhn @cwebber

I expect the world looks very different from where you’re sitting than from where I am. Every time I look at my (FOSS-heavy) fedi feed, I’m struck by the contrast between the AI pessimism & skepticism here versus everywhere else I look.

LLMs have become part of everyday life for vast swaths of ordinary people. Skilled software developers routinely use them to produce code that’s far from slop. And probably most importantly, the AI industry is widely viewed as the most significant driver of U.S. economic growth and competitive advantage going right now.

All of those things surely sound negative to you, but they’re descriptively true. And against that backdrop, I see very little possibility that US courts will cut OpenAI et al off at the knees, even though we’ll surely see adverse rulings in cases of obvious misappropriation (Anthropic’s trove of pirated books, Sora reproducing entire songs from its training data).

Reply to @cwebber@social.coop Aaron Williamson@copiesofcopies@social.coop (2026-10-15 23:10:40) @cwebber @bkuhn @trashheap IMO the real challenge to FOSS enforcement against LLM producers is the same one everyone else has: if the training is fair use because the resulting model is transformative, the producer doesn’t need a license (and doesn’t have to respect the terms of any existing license). It’s still early early days in terms of court decisions, but this looks like the direction we’re headed in the US (though the outcome will likely vary depending on how much memorization a model can be shown to do).