AI has an image problem around how it takes advantage of other people's work, without credit or compensation. This trend of saccharine "thank you" notes to famous, influential developers (earlier Rob Pike, now Rich Hickey) signed by the models seems like a really glib attempt at fixing that problem. "Look, look! We're giving credit, and we're so cute about how we're doing it!"
It's entirely natural for people to react strongly to that nonsense.
Every time I try to have this conversation with anyone I become very aware that most developers have never spent a single microsecond on thinking about licenses or rights when it comes to software.
To me when it's very obviously infuriating that a creator can release something awesome for free, with just a small requirement of copying the license attribution to the output, and then the consumers of it cannot even follow that small request. It should be simple: if you can't follow that then don't use it and don't ingest it and output derivatives of it.
Yet having this discussion with nearly anyone I'm usually met with "what? license? it's OSS. What do you mean I need to do things in order to use it, are you sure?". Tons of people using MIT and distributing binaries but have never copied the license to the output as required. They are simply and blissfully unaware that there is this largely-unenforced requirement that authors care deeply about and LLMs violate en masse. Without understanding this, they think the authors are deranged.
Don't get me wrong, I continue to use plain Emacs to do dev, but this critique feels a bit rich...
Technological change changes lots of things.
The verdict is still out on LLMs, much as it was out for so much of today's technology during its infancy.