You can of course have any opinion you want. But this is not just about the authors having an opinion. It's about them starting a harassment campaign based on just faulty facts and making no attempt at verifying them.
If we work from the nuclear bomb analogy, you certainly don't need to be a nuclear physicist to protest nuclear bombs. You just need to have some a reasonably correct high level understanding of the impact of a nuclear bomb. But that's not what is happening here. This is more like storming the Belgian embassy to stop Belgium from using their nuclear arsenal to trigger a chain reaction in the atmosphere: totally detached from reality in every aspect.
As far as I can tell from your messages on this, you think that the harassment was entirely justified. Is that correct?
I don't think it is totally detached from reality. I believe that engineers are generally pretty bad at realizing the impact technology will have on society. There are many concerns with generative AI in general: it can potentially "break the Internet" (by finishing breaking search engines which already struggle with SEO), or maybe democracy, who knows? Copyright is one such problem.
> you think that the harassment was entirely justified. Is that correct?
I honestly don't know how far it went. What I saw in the article is a few authors who wrote online that they wanted their book removed from that software. Not sure if it is closer to harassment or to lobbying.
What I see, however, is many comments of engineers who don't see the problem with copyright and who don't seem to understand why non-engineers may be against this technology, or why one would even think about forbidding a technology ("but technology is neutral"). My point is just that those engineers should maybe take a step back and try to reflect on that "technology is neutral" belief.
If we work from the nuclear bomb analogy, you certainly don't need to be a nuclear physicist to protest nuclear bombs. You just need to have some a reasonably correct high level understanding of the impact of a nuclear bomb. But that's not what is happening here. This is more like storming the Belgian embassy to stop Belgium from using their nuclear arsenal to trigger a chain reaction in the atmosphere: totally detached from reality in every aspect.
As far as I can tell from your messages on this, you think that the harassment was entirely justified. Is that correct?