I mean, it's a very common argument and it's simply flawed.

You as a human are allowed to read the contents of say IMBD and summarise it to your friends free of charge. You can even be a paid movie critic and base your opinions on IMDB just fine. But if you build a website that says "I'll give you my opinion about a film for £5" and it's just based on the input from IMBD I'm sure we can both agree that you crossed the line - and that you're using another person's service to make your own business without compensating them. That's what LLMs are doing.

Honestly I'm just so tired of the whole "yeah but humans are the same because we also learn by reading stuff". These companies have effectively "read" everything ever made, free of charge, and are selling it back to us packaged in stupid bots that can only function because they were given that data. It doesn't compare at all to how a human learns and then uses information, unless you know someone who can do it on that kind of scale. LLMs don't "gleam" - they consume wholesale.

> You can even be a paid movie critic and base your opinions on IMDB just fine. But if you build a website that says "I'll give you my opinion about a film for £5" and it's just based on the input from IMBD I'm sure we can both agree that you crossed the line

I don't agree with this assessment at all. Why would it be fine to be a paid movie critic basic your opinions on IMDB but not for a website to the same?

Because the critic develops their own opinion on what they read from IMDB and even if they only ever learnt from IMDB and nothing else it's their own take on it. LLMs don't have their own take on anything - it's a statistical amalgamation of everything they read but they don't have their own personal identity or opininion. Likewise, providing a paid service website that only has one data source means you are just selling that data back without permission.