This take is correct although I would make one addition. It is true that copyright violation doesn’t happen when copyrighted material is inputted or when models are trained. While the outputs of these models are not necessarily copyright violations, it is possible for them to violate copyright. The same standards for violation that apply to humans should apply to these models.
I entirely reject the claims that there should be one standard for humans and another for these models. Every time this debate pops up, people claim some province based on ‘intelligence’ or ‘conscience’ or ‘understanding’ or ‘awareness’. This is a meaningless argument because we have no clear understanding about what those things are. I’m not claiming anything about the nature of these models. I’m just pointing out that people love to apply an undefined standard to them.
We should apply the same copyright standards to people, models, corporations, and old-school algorithms.
As an intellectual exercise, what do you suppose are the chances that Vance is a nazi? I don’t mean ‘nazi’ in a rhetorical sense, and I don’t mean ‘nazi’ in the sense that his worldview and ideologies overlap with those of nazis. I mean, what are the chances that he’s actually in his basement with a brown shirt, seig heil-ing from time to time? It probably doesn’t matter, as long as his civic actions support that cause anyway. But I wonder this each time I hear yet another awful detail about this loser. I peg it at about 10%, low but definitely above zero.