The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...
It would be very easy to make training ML models on publicly available data illegal. I think that would be a very bad thing because it would legally enshrine a difference between human learning and machine learning in a broader sense, and I think machine learning has huge potential to improve everyone's lives.
Artists are in a similar position to grooms and farriers demanding the combustion engine be banned from the roads for spooking horses. They have a good point, but could easily screw everyone else over and halt technological progress for decades. I want to help them, but want to unblock ML progress more.
How about we legally enshrine a difference between human learning and corporate product learning? If you want to use things others made for free, you should give back for free. Otherwise if you’re profiting off of it, you have to come to some agreement with the people whose work you’re profiting off of.
Ideally we’d see something opt-in to decide exactly how much you have to give back, and how much you have to constrain your own downstream users. And in fact we do see that. We have copyleft licenses for tons of code and media released to the public (e.g. GPL, CC-BY-SA NC, etc). It lets you define how someone can use your stuff without talking to you, and lays out the parameters for exactly how/whether you have to give back.