I don't know if this is tangential or not, but thank you. You've helped me progress my armchair understanding of how we might give the concept of copyright more

I don't know if this is tangential or not, but thank you. You've helped me progress my armchair understanding of how we might give the concept of copyright more finesse in the digital age. The insight is that encoding content is not functionally the same as copying verbatim a work which is the original intent of the concept. For example: if I have legally obtained a copy of e.g. https://archive.org/details/free_culture https://archive.org/details/free_culture, then I am at liberty to encode it in whatever format I need to be able to feed it to a machine/tool for whatever purpose I want. I am not infringing on copyright because I legally obtained the work, and the machine is not because machines can't. I think at least this much OpenAI has in their favor. If they can prove they legally obtained all the training material (I do think it's fair for them to be required to pay once for it) then I don't think there's any world in which it makes sense to try and allow content creators to further extract royalties from that process alone. If a user asks an AI for a copyrighted poem, for instance, and the user goes and republishes that poem as their own, I do think it may make sense to grant the original author royalties under current law. I really hope we can legally pick these two concepts apart and focus on each scenario independently. I see a lot of people here arguing that giving a work that you have legally obtained the rights to view to a machine model is inherently copyright infringement because you had to copy the work and yada yada is it fair use? I really think this is wrong both in the interpretation of copyright and practically as ideas can't be owned and it makes no sense to limit which ideas were used to make what commercial product etc. (we don't do that today and AI doesn't change that).