I think this might be hypocritical of me, but in one sense I think I prefer that outcome. Let those existing trained models become the most vile and untouchable of copyright infringing works. Send those ill-gotten corporate gains back to the rights holders.

What, me? Of course I’ve erased all my copies of those evil, evil models. There’s no way I’m keeping my own copies to run, illicitly, on my own hardware.

(This probably has terrible consequences I haven’t thought far enough ahead on.)

I think you’re right about style. As a software developer myself, I keep thinking back to early commercial / business software terms that listed all of the exhaustive ways you could not add their work to any “information retrieval system.” And I think, ultimately, computers cannot process style. They can process something, and style feels like the closest thing our brains can come up with.

This feels trite at first, but computers process data. They don’t have a sense of style. They don’t have independent thought, even if you call it a “<think> tag”. Any work product created by a computer from copyrighted information is a derivative work, in the same way a machine-translated version of a popular fiction book is.

This act of mass corporate disobedience, putting distillate made from our collective human works behind a paywall needs to be punished.

. . .

But it won’t be. That bugs me to no end.

(I feel like my tone became a bit odd, so if it felt like the I was yelling at the poster I replied to, I apologize. The topic bugs me, but what you said is true and you’re also correct.)