> That's the thing though: intuitively, they do - training the model != generating from the model, and it's the output of a generation that violates copyright (and the user-supplied prompt is a crucial ingredient in getting the potentially copyrighted material to appear). And legally, that's AFAIK still an open question.
It's still copyright infringement if I download a pirated movie and never watch it (writing the bytes to the disk == "training" the disk's "model", reading the bytes back == "generating" from the disk's "model").
> That's 100% true. I know that, I'm not denying that. But in this particular case, I find my own views align with their case.
IMHO, unless you're massively wealthy and/or running a bigcorp, people like you benefit a lot more from copyright than are harmed by it. In a world without copyright protection, some bigcorp will be able to use its size to extract the value from the works that are out there (i.e. Amazon and Netflix will stop paying royalties instantly, but they'll still have customers because they have the scale to distribute). Copyright just means the little guy who's actually creating has some claim to get some of the value directed back to them.
> and any individual work that went into training data contributes approximately zero to it.
Then cut all those works out of the training set. I don't think it's an excuse that the infringement has to happen on a massive scale to be of value to the generative AI company.