The problem with this line of thinking is that a person can also cut and paste code that they don’t have a license to use… but until they do, they haven’t done

The problem with this line of thinking is that a person can also cut and paste code that they don’t have a license to use… but until they do, they haven’t done anything wrong by reading the code. So either we carve out an explicit exception that machines aren’t allowed to do things that are remarkably similar to what humans do… which would be a massive setback for AI in the US. Or we agree that generative models are subject to the same rules that humans are — they can’t commit copyright infringement, but are able to appropriately consume copyrighted material that a human would be able to consume. The second option seems to me to be much simpler, nicer, and more appropriate than the first.