I agree wrt/ experience, but I don't think it applies to this situation. Even if you had an experience that would end, their ownership of the data wouldn't, and that, among other things, make this very one-sided.
I do want to stress something from your conclusion though. That people do better if they anticipate change, and can adapt to it.
Whether it's one-sided depends on what you think you've gained and lost. I publish code for free (open source) and I publish my writing for free (on my blog and as comments on various websites).
I don't expect compensation from anyone who uses them, whether it's public or private use, so I don't feel like I've lost anything. Sometimes people "pay it forward." If I actually get something back, that's a win.
There are web search engines and AI chatbots that might be very slightly better (unmeasurably so) due to having been trained on stuff I published over the years. Meanwhile I get a lot of benefit from using free stuff on the Internet. I think that's a one-sided deal in my favor.
(I also pay for GPT4 access. Whether it's worth $20 a month is more questionable, but it's fun to play with and so far I'm interested enough that I haven't cancelled.)
>Whether it's one-sided depends on what you think you've gained and lost.
I completely agree. At the end of the day, winning and losing in this situation cannot be measured, especially the "losing" part wrt/ people, so it all boils down to how the individuals perceive it. (Which is of course why powerful entities put so much effort into PR.)
I personally feel better if there are some safeguards around usage, and so I like licenses like the GPL family, where regulations are in place so that the effort is not completely trivially closed up.
But really, at the end of the day what we can control best is our perception of thing. Life is what we make of it.
Many good things don’t last forever. If they go away that doesn’t invalidate the experiences you had.