It's sad to know that all of my creative work will be used to train future models whether I like it or not. Even if I release my work via physical media only, we've already seen Anthropic use their immense resources to obtain offline media to train their models. It feels like, as an artist, my work can never be kept from falling into the hands of AI companies.
I can empathise with his statement more easily when I think about it in those terms.
We never had the right to tell the future what to do. That was never part of the deal. We barely have the right to tell other people what to do with the ideas we breathe into the world, and that right was only carved into the US Constitution (and English common law before it) because it was believed that it heavily incentivized creating more ideas.
In the era where information flows as freely as it does... I'm not even sure that incentive works the way it was intended to anymore.
When I'm thinking about this, I usually flip the script: why should Disney have the right to tell everyone what they're allowed to do and not do with a picture and audio of a cartoon mouse for a person's actual entire life?