The courts are going to rule in favor of these authors if they have a basic understanding of what’s happening.
They actually are not that different from Photoshop. Regarding providing you copyrighted materials, if you instruct it to generate something someone else already copyrighted, perhaps by using a feature meant to reproduce existing art style, you will generate an infringing work.
As for "ingesting of other copyrighted works to work optimally", you don't know what goes into designing and building Photoshop - how many third-party datasets or copyrighted assets, which get embedded deep into the application in a form that the end-user cannot discover or consume. You don't know, and it doesn't matter, because Adobe using copyrighted materials in building Photoshop does not propagate copyright claims to you the user/renter of Photoshop. Same can be argued about LLMs - copyrighted inputs from training set get sufficiently blended when turned into weights that you, the end user, should be shielded from any IP claims related to the training data.
(Yes, the last point enables "copyright laundering", but I'm not convinced this is a problem - not compared to regulatory environment trying to prevent it.)
And why is it that I pay OpenAI to generate data based off books it stole for free when I had to pay money for the same book.
I know what I am actually paying for is the model obviously but it just feels extra wrong to be paying a company for a service it’s built using pirated content.
Or you just go to the local library. Or you borrow it from a friend. Or you stand in B&N and read it in the store.
You're arguments are not great.
Photoshop now has generative AI features that leverage language models as well as training on imagery, so this is literally false when discussing Photoshop as it currently exists.