The current assumption made by these companies is that AI training is fair use, and is therefore legal regardless of license. There are still many ongoing court cases over this, but one case was already resolved in favor or the fair use position.

The reason the article compares to commercial flights is your everyday reader knows planes’ emissions are large. It’s a reference point so people can weight the ecological tradeoff.

“I can emit this much by either (1) operating the global airline network, or (2) running cloud/LLMs.” It’s a good way to visualize the cost of cloud systems without just citing tons-of-CO2/yr.

Downplaying that by insisting we look at the transportation industry as a whole doesn’t strike you as… a little silly? We know transport is expensive; It is moving tons of mass over hundreds of miles. The fact computer systems even get close is an indication of the sheer scale of energy being poured into them.

Adding: TLS is actually a pretty apt analogy here.

You could make a chat server that just accepts plain text messages over a TLS link, and that’s basically the same security topology as with this Beeper bridge.

But no one would call that a E2EE chat.

Sticking two E2EE tunnels together with a plaintext middleman doesn’t result in a single E2EE tunnel.

The reason the distinction is important is because the security profile is vastly different—a compromised server leads to a compromised message—which isn’t true for actual E2EE services like a pure Matrix link.

Side note: the first thing you should ask of a “end-to-end encrypted” product to you is “which ‘ends’ do you mean?” I’ve seen TLS advertised as E2EE before.