Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a child is instructed to read a copyrighted work at school, which later becomes a factor in his own derivative works, he won't be in breach of copyright. Why should other intelligent entities be prevented from reading copyrighted works and gaining whatever there is to gain from those works the way any human might?
This argument might hold more water when generative models are more than fancy compression algorithms/text completion engines. A more practical way of looking at this is: who is making money off of these models? How did they get their training data? I’m not a fan of copyright in general, but we have serious outstanding issues with companies and organizations stealing or plastering work without compensating the origin…
I doubt that part of the argument would change even if we perfected brain uploads.
Now, if you gave the current LLMs a robot body with a cute face, that'll probably change minds faster, regardless of the underlying architecture.
> who is making money off of these models?
When the models are open source, or at least may be downloaded and used locally for no cost, that would be the users of the models.
And back to the biological comparison: I learned to read (and also to code) in part from the Commodore 64 user manual, should I owe the shareholders anything for my lifetime earnings? As I got to the end of that sentence, a thought struck me: taxes do that. And in the UK the question of if university should be funded by taxes or by the students themselves followed the same lines.