I understand the anger about large tech companies using others work without compensation, especially when both they and their users benefit financially. But this goes beyond economcis. LLM tech could accelerate advances in medicine and technology. I strongly believe that we're going to see societal benefits in education, healthcare, especially mental health support thanks to this tech.

I also think that someone making money off LLM's is a separate question from whether or not the original creator has been harmed. I think many creators are going to benefit from better tools, and we'll likely see new forms of creation become viable.

We already recognize that certain uses of intellectual property should be permitted for societies benefit. We have fair use doctrine, patent compulsory licensing for public health, research exmpetions, and public libraries. Transformative use is also permitted, and LLMs are inherently transformative. Look at the volume of data that they ingest compared to the final size of a trained model, and how fundamentally different the output format is from the input data.

Human progress has always built upon existing knowledge. Consider how both Darwin and Wallace independently developed evolution theory at roughly the same time -- not from isolation, but from building on the intellectual foundation of their era. Everything in human culture builds on what came before.

That all being said, I'm also sure that this tech is going to negative impact people too. Like I said in the other reply, whether or not this tech is good or bad will depend on who you ask. I just think that we should weigh these costs against the potential benefits to society as a whole rather than simply preserving existing systems, or blindly following the law as if the law is inherently just or good. Copyright law was made before this tech was even imagined, and it seems fair to now evaluate whether the current copyright regime makes sense if it turns out that it'd keep us in some local maximum.

The other problem with the legal argument that it's "just like a person learning" is that corporations whose human employees have learned what copyrighted characters look like and then start incorporating them into their art are considered guilty of copyright violation, and don't get to deploy the "it's not an intentional copyright violation from someone who should have known better, it's just a tool outputting what the user requested" defence...

Not sure about US or other jurisdictions, but that's not how any of this works in Germany. In Germany downloading anything from anywhere (even a movie) is never illegal and does not require a license. What's illegal is publishing/disseminating copyrighted content without authorization. BitTorrenting a movie is illegal because you're distributing it to other torrenters. Streaming a movie on your website is illegal because it's public. You can be held liable for using a photo from the web to illustrate your eBay auction, not because you downloaded it but because you republished it.

OpenAI (and Google and everyone else) is creating a publicly-accessible system that produces output that could be derived from copyrighted material.

I'm only allowed to view it? I can't download it, convert each word into a color, and create a weird piece of art work out of it? I think I can.