If someone buys a copy of your book, they have every right to rip it into shreds, burn it in a trash can, roll it into cigarettes and smoke it, or scribble swear words on every page, regardless of how you feel about it.
If someone buys a copy of your book, they have every right to prop it up in front of a typewriter and retype it word for word, just for the fun of feeling how their fingers dance as your words flow through them. They have a right to read it out loud to their child.
I think writers have been forgetting lately how important it is to protect our rights — yes, ours, all of ours — to do what we want with the things in our own possession. And one of the things people can choose to do is train LLMs.
Did corporations use pirated copies of books to train LLMs? Honestly, I don’t care. Why? Because if they paid for a copy of every single book used, that’d be one pathetic, tiny lump sum for most authors. I guess, some people who’ve written a lot of books would have one good day.
But you only need one copy of a book used once to train an LLM. And then you have an entirely different kind of thing, because an LLM does not contain your book, is not in direct competition with your book, and is a derivative work in only the most egregiously over-zealous sense.
So, really, all the furor about “they stole my book!” is just so goddamned infuriating. Did they steal a copy? Maybe. But would writers calm down if it turned out that actually each individual book copy had been paid for? Clearly not. And that just makes it all so disingenuous.