You’re making the exact same kind of maximalist argument as people who argued that ripping a CD and letting your brother listen to the MP3s is exactly morally a

You’re making the exact same kind of maximalist argument as people who argued that ripping a CD and letting your brother listen to the MP3s is exactly morally and criminally like shoplifting the disc. Or that recording a movie off TV was equal to stealing it. (That particular one was of course famously judged by the courts as “tough shit” to the copyright owners who sued over it.) Yes, training does impart some fraction of an article into the weights. NYT famously “demonstrated” this by like typing whole paragraphs of their articles into GPT and having the model produce some of the following sentences. However, this substitutes for the article in zero ways, since if you need the article to summon the article…who cares? We should admit that nothing about our copyright law intentionally weighed in about LLMs. It’s simply nuts to apply a law to a situation when its drafters had no idea of the positive or negative implications of such an application. It would be like applying a law that calculated prison time based on number of horses stolen to someone who stole a Honda Civic with 100hp and saying that clearly they should get 100 years because it is equal to 100 horses. Now, I get that we have a useless legislative branch which even if they actually passed intentionally applicable laws, they’d be stupid ones, but I think making simplistic analogies like that do not help anyone, other than the Luddites. Look, the cat is out of the bag and even if say, the US government effectively killed all Gen AI by forcing any training to be done with material you own the copyright of, countries like China (and criminals, who can simply use the tech in secret) will happily just pull ahead of us and economically demolish us - like any country would have done if a competing country had banned electricity 100 years ago. We need something better than the ridiculously unfit 200-year old paradigm for this.