IMO the author absolutely nails it. Yes, it might not be the most nuanced take, but they express what many of us are thinking.
> Google and Yahoo and even DDG have been using copyrighted data for a quarter century, if not longer.
Your argument boils down to: companies haven't respected copyright or user consent for a long time, so why should we now care?
The answer is: it was wrong back then and it is still wrong now, but on a completely different scale! We have reached a tipping point where many people are (rightfully) furious.
> Consent was gone when Google, Yahoo, etc. started indexing the entire internet.
People do not have a problem with Google indexing the web because they want their websites to be found. That's the entire purpose of putting stuff out on the internet. AI is now doing the opposite: traffic is directed to chatbots and platforms are flooded with AI slop.
As you said, people were already complaining when Google started to show their own summaries, preventing users from visiting the original sources. People have been complaining about Facebook drowning the frontpage with clickbait. But this time it is so much worse.
Sure, LLMs can be useful, but on the other hand the potential for abuse is humongous. People are already seeing the negative consequences and they are rightfully angry.
> Come up with an interesting point or thought-provoking counter-argument and maybe people will take you seriously.
I do think that the author made a good point by bringing up the issue of consent. We are now in a situation where I can't post anything online without AI companies possibly scraping the content and feeding it into their models without any attribution or permission. And there is no way of opting out. Don't you see a problem with that? Why should we not care?