I understand your moral position. But you must realize that's not what copyright does. That's wishful thinking, the sort often manifest in modern written work

I understand your moral position. But you must realize that's not what copyright does. That's wishful thinking, the sort often manifest in modern written works on the copyright page where the publisher helpfully writes, "The moral right of the author has been asserted". Begging the question: What moral right, other than the legal copyright that was already asserted separately? Note the irony, too: It's the publisher writing about morality on behalf of the author. It's the publisher that would give consent for any AI-training use in your concept of the proper legal and moral order of things. The author probably doesn't know much about copyright law, but wants the work monetized as much as possible, because they like having a house and eating food, and sure, creating more content sometimes. To that end, they've assigned copyright to their publisher. Or independent creators would have to create a union and assign licensing power to the union leadership. But again, only licensing to big tech, because nobody else could afford it. Also see the ETA: paragraph in GP, regarding the difficulty of judging whether simple works are copyrightable, or whether complex works have actually been reproduced in a copyright-violating way. This feels like an argument over angels on the head of a pin. Look at the markets. They're all-in on AI. Big tech (and big startup) AI models will move forward, no matter what licensing agreements between publishers and AI behemoths, or copyright exceptions, end up being necessary. The only question is whether others who don't have that power or money should be able to try to train their own models (admittedly probably much lower-parameter, because they don't have datacenters full of H100s) on datasets that are at least in the same ballpark.