Yeah, an LLM, being a machine obviously shouldn't hold copyright. But that doesn't stop people claiming that running vast amounts of code through an LLM can strip copyright from it.

Ultimately LLMs (the first L stands for large and for a good reason) are only possible to create by taking unimaginable amounts of work performed by humans who have not consented to their work being used that way, most of whom require at least being credited in derivative works and many of whom have further conditions.

Now, consent in law is a fairly new concept and for now only applied to sexual matters but I think it should apply to every human interaction. Consent can only be established when it's informed and between parties with similar bargaining power (that's one reason relationships with large age gaps are looked down upon) and can be revoked at any time. None of the authors knew this kind of mass scraping and compression would be possible, it makes sense they should reevaluate whether they want their work used that way.

There are 3 levels to this argument:

1) The letter of the law - if you understand how LLMs work, it's hard to see them as anything more than mechanical transformers of existing work so the letter should be sufficient.

2) The intent of the law - it's clear it was meant to protect human authors from exploitation by those who are in positions where they can take existing work and benefit from it without compensating the authors.

3) The ethics and morality of the matter - here it's blatantly obvious that using somebody's work against their wishes and without compensating them is wrong.

In an ideal world, these 3 levels would be identical but they're not. That means we should strive to make laws (in both intent and letter) more fair and just by changing them.