The argument was not "human can do it so should machine qed". The fact that humans so easily do something is a talking point in a large subthread, not the conclusion.

Yes, an AI model is just a digital machine that is presently hard for many people to distinguish from magic.

> This entire case is just a corporate power-grab seeking to profit from the work of others for free without legal repercussion, and it's sad seeing so many people jump to support the corporations.

This is where you're wrong. There's very clearly an active and relevant dialog surrounding the concept of machine generated content and how it should be interpreted by society (now that machines are getting really good at doing things that were difficult in previous decades). So at a surface level it's hardly decided.

Further your assertion that people who use copyrighted works to create a product that provides value to society are unfairly being enriched at the expense of copyright holders is naïve and uninformed by reality. People use impression of copyrighted material all the time in their day to day lives in everything they do. I read copyrighted textbooks to learn skills required to provide value to society. I read the news all the time and make decisions based off it. So to say that OpenAI can't feed a machine the text of a popular book (one which is has legally obtained a copy of) in order to calibrate weights used to help it emulate reality is not based in any current notion of fairness even as protected by copyright today. A naïve reading of copyright would argue you had to copy the work to do that and you don't have the right to that, but a sophisticated understanding would argue that that's fair use because it happens billions of times a day and it doesn't realistically compete with the author's market for the book, interoperating with a machine is protected under the DMCA, it's a damn computer anybody using one is copying around bytes in memory when they launch their ereader to view a copyrighted work fairly all the time that's just how digital things work etc. etc. Ideas can't be copyrighted.

What is arguable is whether there's a problem if an LLM reproduces parts or all of a copyrighted work. Some people think AI should launder copyright, some think the human generating the work should be held to all the normal standards of not plagiarizing or otherwise committing copyright infringement in what they decide to do with the LLM output, and some argue OpenAI should pay a royalty every time it does (or something to that effect).

Long story short, this isn't some random corporate power grab. As a fellow human, I very much believe society can navigate the introduction of LLMs without devolving into "every piece of training data must be specifically licensed to be used as such and don't forget royalties". I don't like the society I imagine if we take that stance (frankly I don't like copyright as it is deployed today) and I believe the value LLMs provide will do more positive than negative so it's irresponsible for society to unduly limit the proliferation of this technology in a bygone effort to protect old school content creators (well really publishing conglomerates and large media corporations).