I always wonder if anyone out there thinks they're not making money off of other people's work. If you're coding, writing a fantasy novel, taking a photograph or drawing a picture from first principals you came up with yourself I applaud you though.
Seriously though, I do think that is the case. It would be self-righteous to argue otherwise. It's just the scale and the nature of this, that makes it so repulsive. For my taste, copying something without permission, is stealing. I don't care what a judge somewhere thinks of it. Using someone's good will for profit is disgusting. And I hope we all get to profit from it someday, not just a select few. But that is just my opinion.
Or if you had to buy the book yourself, same thing, distributed, royalties paid.
That does seem more reasonable, but makes public libraries also evil.
For LLMs the transformative part is then removing the copyright info and serving it to you as OpenAI whatever.
Sure, you can query multiple books at the same time and the technology is godlike. But the underlying issue remains. Without the original content, the LLM is useless. Someone took all the books, feed them in and didn't pay anything back to the authors.
I'm not sure whether arguing in good faith here. This information you could easily check for yourself too. The problem is not the information itself. It's the massive machinery that steals all the works and one day we are staring at the paywall. And the artists are still not funded. I'd rather just do something nice offline in the future.
It will be applied to people soon after.
And as far as it being for the greater good that seems to be the promise of many of these companies. What will inevitably get in the way is greed and money, the very same reasons we're arguing about IP theft. Good or bad I see no way out of this but through at this point.