It’s certainly been odd to watch the general perceptions on copyright shift as AI has come around. From what I can tell, it stems from a general David vs Goliath mentality. Years ago when filesharing started to come around, it was seen as the common people against the large corporations. The MPAA would try to tell us that downloading a movie is “stealing” and we all told them to fuck off. Now, culture has changed, a lot more people consider themselves to be creators, or social media lets people feel closer to creators. Now, its the big tech companies up against individual artists. Rather than seeing it in terms of copyright itself, people just see big bad company against little guys.

I never were truly anti-copyright, I just don’t like that the current system favors big corporations over the people.

Just leave poor people alone and public domain should start at the death of the author(s).

I believe “the Left” doesn’t really have that much of a problem with copyright, it’s just that the current implementation is absurd regarding length and because of the way stuff like the DMCA and the general society is structured, it is very much rules for thee but not for me with the companies. Copyright (in its current form) mainly protects the revenue of companies while imposing large restrictions on the consumer and by an extent derivative works. However with AI, not only are the models trained and content to which large corporations have control over but also stuff like blogs, copy left code, indie books etc, so this would be one of the cases where copyright could (and should IMO) protect the authors, but realistically this will be a fight entirely between the big players, be it copyright holders or AI companies, that have the funds to fight the legal battles. I think that this has shown a lot of people that, at least in a capitalist society, there should be some form of copyright, but definitely in a reformed way that actually protects creators instead of corporations and doesn’t last indefinitely. Copyright is also very much a problem for left leaning ideology under capitalism ideally there would be no copyright but creators would still get paid, which isn’t really compatible with capitalism.

Could it be “if it stops me getting at stuff, copyright bad. If it stops the rich getting richer, copyright good”?

Flip-flopping in general happens when people are more rooted in politics than principles. That might be what’s going on here.

I believe that in the age of AI many leftists have evolved and many now believe that copyright is now necessary to protect human creativity, expression, and culture from Generative AI. A pragmatic shift rather than a ideological shift