This argument strategy, where you make a strained analogy/metaphor, and then apply it back to the original topic - it's fragile and depends on how comparable the two ideas are. If you're just interested in winning discussions, it's a bad tactic because it opens up a whole new avenue for your opponent to attack.

Can I COPY nurses into equally valuable robots? Because if I can, then yeah - the world would be a MUCH better place with abundant and affordable nurse robots, and the human nurses can go find other jobs. I have some friends who are nurses, and after watching them fight with the medical system for their own health issues, I'm pretty sure they'd agree.

Admit it - you misunderstood my original point and accused me of then changing the argument.

Bottom line - the original poster was implying there was no harm because simple copying doesn't create a loss. I was pointing out that a key test ( in considering copyright issues ) is whether such an action causing harm - and in this case there are many very good cases to be made about resulting loss of revenue.

Let's be clear, I think LLMs etc are a huge technical advance - I just think it's wrong to try and ignore the law because it get's in the way of large companies attempts to make money.

I've tried (and occasionally failed) to avoid the parts of what you wrote which were just the typical flame war bait. And of course I'm guilty of trying to antagonize you in a few places. The topic is interesting, but our conversation about it was not.

I appreciate the link to the UK law, but the rest of this comment thread is mostly two people talking past each other.

Because that's how it works in reality. Once the copyright holders get their teeth in something, it gets paywalled. For instance, poor people don't have (free/legal/easy) access to lots of research papers/articles which were paid for with government grants. And copyright industry associations (MPAA, RIAA, CCC, AAP, ...) lobby to extend the laws so that creative works take lifetimes to enter the public domain.

You think you're arguing in favor of the little guy who made a series of blog posts or digital art? That's naive.

> My point is simply that in building the models they have to respect the current laws

So go enforce those laws. The rent seekers will thank you.

Seems you have bought into the idea idea that companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft are the poor little guys. Wow.

What we are talking about here is certain companies trying to gain a defacto monopoly on the sum of human knowledge - without paying any of those people who built it in the first place.

This is the real story.

Now it may well be their moat isn't as big as they thought it was and the greedy investors trying to do this heist will fail - but that's what they are attempting - and you are cheer leading for it.