>We know this is illegal

>It's a CRYSTAL CLEAR violation of the law

in the court of reddit's public opinion, perhaps.

there is, as far as I can tell, no definite ruling about whether training is a copyright violation.

and even if there was, US law is not global law. China, notably, doesn't give a flying fuck. kill American AI companies and you will hand the market over to China. that is why "everyone just shrugs it off".

China is doing human gene editing and embryo cloning too, we should get right on that. They're harvesting organs from a captive population too, we should do that as well otherwise we might fall behind on transplants & all the money & science involved with that. Lots of countries have drafts and mandatory military service too. This is the zero-morality darwinian view, all is fair in competition. In this view, any stealing that China or anyone does is perfectly fine too because they too need to compete with the US.

The "China will win the AI race" if we in the West (America) don't is an excuse created by those who started the race in Silicon Valley. It's like America saying it had to win the nuclear arms race, when physicists like Oppenheimer back in the late 1940s were wanting to prevent it once they understood the consequences.