[generatedtruth]

No it's because what they are trying to automate is creativity. I can ask any artist/writer to write me a story or create a character like "X" but black and they get to use the knowledge of that character. An AI needs context just like any other intelligence.

[TeMPOraL]

This. And, commercial or not, what they're creating is fundamentally more important and more valuable for humanity than any of the inputs that go into it.

And, by "they", I don't mean just OpenAI. If it were just them, you could perhaps argue they shouldn't be getting a free pass (I'd rather go with "potentially too dangerous to be allowed to exist" angle though). But it's not just them. The same training process and the same use of copyrighted content powers all the commercial and non-commercial models, including SOTA competitors like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and "open source" wannabes derived from various Llama versions, which are not far behind.

To me, the "open source" models alone are already good enough to outweigh any copy rights being violated through use of unlicensed materials in training.