It's not about copyright _maximalism,_ it's about having _literally any regard for copyright_ and enforcing the law in a proportionate way regardless of who's breaking the laws.
Everyone I know has stories about their ISP sending nastygrams threatening legal action over torrenting, but now that corporations (whose US legal personhood appears to matter only when it benefits them) are doing it as part of the development of a commercial product that they expect to charge people for, that's fine?
And in any case, my argument had nothing to do with copyright (though I do hate the hypocrisy of the situation), and whether or not it's "nothing to worry about" in the long run, it seems like it'll cause a lot of harm before the benefits are felt in society at large. Whatever purported benefits actually come of this, we'll have to deal with:
- Even more mass layoffs that use LLMs as justification (not just in software, either). These are people's livelihoods; we're coming off of several nearly-consecutive "once-in-a-generation" financial crises, a growing affordability crisis in much of the developed world, and stagnating wages. Many people will be hit very hard by layoffs.
- A seniority crisis as companies increasingly try to replace entry-level jobs with LLMs, meaning that people in a crucial learning stage of their jobs will have to either replace much of the learning curve for their domain with the learning curve of using LLMs (which is dubiously a good thing), or face unemployment, and leaving industries to deal with the aging-out of their talent pools
- We've already been heading towards something of an information apocalypse, but now it seems more real than ever, and the industry's response seems to broadly be "let's make the lying machines lie even more convincingly"
- The financial viability of these products seems... questionable right now, at best, and given that the people running the show are opening up data centres in some of the most expensive energy markets around (and in the US's case, one that uniquely disincentivizes the development of affordable clean energy), I'm not sure that anyone's really interested in a path to financial sustainability for this tech
- The environmental impact of these projects is getting to be significant. It's not as bad as Bitcoin mining yet, AFAIK, but if we keep on, it'll get there.
- Recent reports show that the LLM industry is starting to take up a significant slice of the US economy, and that's never a good sign for an industry that seems to be backed by so much speculation rather than real-world profitability. This is how market crashes happen.