> It misses the forest for the trees.

Yes, this is something I can agree with - many people are aware of societal issues in the small (abusive people they interact with personally, specific instances of injustice which affect them personally) but are unable or unwilling to see the bigger picture and that those instances are just the result of how the system is setup and allowed to exist.

> to suggest that any one person might have ownership over the specific combination of ingredients ... patently absurd.

I don't think that's what the author is trying to say. How I understand it (and my view as well) is that LLM take "content" from multiple people and mix it together in a way which erases authorship. As a result 1) any individuality is lost 2) the formerly human to human interaction is now replaced by both humans interacting with a middleman and at least one of them not consensually.

My addition: on top of that the middleman expects to get paid, despite not doing any original work and despite harming the people whose "content" it reproduces. And that is parasitic behavior.

> I can run an open model on my local machine and have it synthesize for me at whim without big corpo in the equation at all.

Yes, that removes the parasitic middleman but not the issue that other people's work is being plagiarized and/or used in a way that never consented to. For example, I published a bunch of code under GPL or AGPL because I want my users to have the right to inspect and modify the code and more importantly, I want that right to extend to anything build on top of that work. A byproduct is that the copyleft licenses seem to be considered toxic by many corporations so they won't touch it with a ten foot pole and won't make money off my free work.

> Stated somewhat ungenerously, it's not "for people", it's "for ME to decide who it's for."

And I don't think there's anything wrong with either approach. Specifically, the second extends to everyone. If I get to decide how others can use my work, others get the same right and we all benefit in return. Cooperation should be based on mutual agreement, not be forced.

Even if somebody found a cure for all the cancers, I don't think society has any right to take it from them or force them to publish it. Instead, if society at large wants it that much, it should offer sufficient reward so that both sides come to an agreement.