If you acknowledge the problem with theft from artists, do you not acknowledge there’s a problem with theft from coders? Code intended to be fully open source with licenses requiring derivatives to be open source is now being served up for closed source uses at the press of a button with no acknowledgement.
For what it’s worth, I think AI would be much better in a post scarcity moneyless society, but so long as people need to be paid for their work I find it hard to use ethically. The time it might take individuals to do the things offloaded to AI might mean a company would need to hire an additional person if they were not using AI. If AI were not trained unethically then I’d view it as a productivity tool and so be it, but because it has stolen for its training data it’s hard for me to view it as a neutral tool.
I don’t think training on all public information is super ethical regardless, but to the extent that others may support it, I understand that SO may be seen as fair game. To my knowledge though, all the big AIs I’m aware of have been trained on GitHub regardless of any individual projects license.
It’s not about proving individual code theft, it’s about recognizing the model itself is built from theft. Just because an AI image output might not resemble any preexisting piece of art doesn’t mean it isn’t based on theft. Can I ask what you used that was trained on just a projects documentation? Considering the amount of data usually needed for coherent output, I would be surprised if it did not need some additional data.