> If the argument is that human authors should get a cut of AI profits because their works were "stolen" to train the models, this is going to be a increasingly losing argument, because it doesn't have a leg to stand on for private training data.

The argument can be made that LLMs could not be created without expropriating the original works of all the authors they were trained on, and that argument would in fact be true and have quite sturdy legs as far as I’m concerned.

It’s not a historical instance of forgotten times, it started less than half a decade ago and I would be surprised if it’s not still ongoing (your argument about synthetic training data is forward-looking).