I agree that we have a new situation developing; but we're not going to get any clarity unless we see clearly what the new situation is. There are several thin

I agree that we have a new situation developing; but we're not going to get any clarity unless we see clearly what the new situation is. There are several things you're still conflating: 1. The ability of an entity (human or AI) which can be prompted to produce copyright-infringing material. 2. Actually producing copyright-infringing material. Sure, if OpenAI is actually producing copyright-infringing material at scale, unprompted, then that needs to be addressed. If a common way around NYT's paywall were to copy & paste the first few lines into ChatGPT and then read the rest of the article, then yes, that's a hole that needs to be filled. But that's with the production and dissemination, not the training. Regarding scale, yes, there is a difference here, but it's more subtle than you think. There are probably millions of toddlers who can recite The Gruffalo nearly verbatim. However, each of those toddlers were trained individually. Similarly, there are probably thousands, maybe tens of thousands of artists who, when prompted, could generate an image that would be similar enough to the presented image to violate copyright. But again, each of those individuals were trained separately. The difference that modern tech companies have is that they can train their systems once, and then duplicate the same training across millions of instances. One potential argument to make here would be to say: Training with this material is fair use; but fair use or not, those weights are now a derivative work. You can use exactly one copy of those weights, but you can't copy those weights millions of times, any more than it would be fair use to distribute one copy of that image to everyone in the company. You need to either train millions of copies, or pay licensing fees. I'm not sure I agree with that argument, but at least it seems to me to bring the actual issues into more clarity.