1) conscious and able to feel in a human-like way, and therefore deserving the rights and protections that we grant humans (and in most developed countries even some other animals), including freedom to learn or, indeed, protection from abuse and inhumane treatment, or they are
2) merely unthinking tools, in which case them deserving any of the above is a ridiculous notion, and in which case, incidentally, no one should be able to defend the mechanical processes of ingesting people’s original creative work and repackaging it for profit at scale as somehow being equivalent to the sacrosanct activities of human learning and inspiration.
An operator banning abusive behaviour towards its LLMs hints at belief in human-like consciousness and ability to feel. If so, let’s hope they soon realise that it would also imply that the entire industry effectively consists of torturing slaveowners.