We can, and do, choose to treat normal people different from billion dollar companies that are attempting to suck up all human output and turn it into their own personal profit.

If they were, say, a charity doing this for the good of mankind, I’d have more sympathy. Shame they never were.

The way to treat them differently is not by making them share profits with another corporation. The logical endgame of all this isn’t “stopping LLMs,” it’s Disney happening to own a critical mass of IP to be able to legally train and run LLMs that make movies, firing all their employees, and no smaller company ever having a chance in hell with competing with a literal century’s worth of IP powering a generative model.

The best party about all this is that Disney initially took off by… making use of public domain works. Copyright used to last 14 years. You’d be able to create derivative works of most the art in your life at some point. Now you’re never allowed to. And more often than not, not to grant a monopoly to the “author”, but to the corporation that hired them. The correct analysis shouldn’t be OpenAI vs. Intercept or Disney of whomever. You’re just choosing kings at that point.