You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transformed" to basically launder it via "AI", I can absolutely see why someone rational would want to share a whole lot less, anywhere, in an open fashion, regardless of where it's hosted.
I'd honestly rather see and think more about how to segment communities locally, and go back to the "fragmented" way things once were. It's easier to want to share with other real people than inadvertently working for free to enrich companies.
So? What do I care? If some stuff I posted to my website (with no requirement for attribution or remuneration, and also no guarantee that the information is true or valid) can improve the AI services that I use, great.
The problem in this case is that it doesn't matter. The AI stuff is going to exist, and compete with them, whether the AI companies have to pay some pittance for training data or not.
But the chorus is made worse by two major factors.
First, many of the AI companies themselves are closed-source profiteers. "OpenAI" stepping all over themselves to be the opposite of their own name etc. If all the models got trained and then published, people would be much more inclined to say "oh, this is neat, I can use this myself and it knows my own work". But when you have companies hoovering everything up for free and then trying to keep the result proprietary, they look like scumbags and that pisses people off.
Second, then you get other opportunistic scumbags who try to turn that legitimate ire into their own profit by claiming that training for free should be prohibited so that only proprietary models can be created.
Whereas the solution you actually want is that anybody can train a model on public data but then they have to publish the model/weights. Which is probably not going to happen because in practice the law is likely to end up being what favors one of the scumbags.
So, imagine the scenario where you, an artist, trained for years to develop a specific technique and style, only for a massively funded company to swoop in, train a model on your art, make bank off of your skill while you get nothing, and now some rando can also create look-alikes (and also potentially profit from them - I've seen AI-generated images for sale at physical print stores and Etsy that mimic art styles of modern artists), potentially destroying your livelihood. Very little to be happy about here, to be frank.
It's less about competition and more about the ethical way to do it. If another artist would learn the same techniques and then managed to produce similar art, do you think there would be just as visceral of a reaction to them publishing their art? Likely not, because it still required skill to achieve what they did. Someone with a model and a prompt is nowhere near that same skill level, yet they now get to reap the benefits of the artist's developed craft. Is this "gatekeeping what's art"? I don't think so. Is this fair in any capacity? I don't think so either. Because we're comparing apples to pinecones.
All that being said, I do agree that the ship has sailed - the models are there, the trend of training on art AND written content shared openly will continue, and we're yet to see what the consequences of that will be. Their presence certainly won't stop me from continuously writing, perfecting my craft, and sharing it with the world. My job is to help others with it.
My hunch is that in the near-term we'll see a major devaluing of both written and image material, while a premium will be put on exceptional human skill. That is, would you pay to read a blog post written and thoroughly researched by Molly White (https://mastodon.social/@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io) or Cory Doctorow (https://pluralistic.net/), or some AI slop generated by an automated aggregator? My hunch is you'd pick the former. I know I would. As an anecdotal data point, and speaking just for myself, if I see now that someone uses AI-generated images in their blog post or site, I almost instantly close the tab. Same applies to videos on YouTube that have an AI-generated thumbnail or static art. It somehow carries a very negative connotation to me.
(Shrug) Artists were wrong when they said the same thing about cameras at the dawn of photography, and they're wrong now.
If you expect to coast through life while everything around you stays the same, neither art nor technology is a great career choice.