Yeah, and even if it WERE truly intelligent – which these SALAMIs are almost certainly not – it doesn’t even matter.

A human and a robot are not the same. They have different needs and must be afforded different moral protections. Someone can buy a book, read it, learn from it, and incorporate things it learned from that experience into their own future work. They may transform it creatively or it may plagiarize or it may rest in some grey area in-between where it isn’t 100% clear if it was novel or plagiarized. All this is also true for a LLM “AI”. – But whether or not this process is fundamentally the same or not isn’t even a relevant question.

Copyright law isn’t something that exists because it is a pure moral good to protect the creative output of a person from theft. It would be far more ethical to say that all the outputs of human intellect should be shared freely and widely for all people to use, unencumbered by such things. But if creativity is rewarded with only starvation, creativity will go away, so copyright exists as a compromise to try and ensure there is food in the bellies of artists. And with it, we have an understanding that there is a LOT of unclear border space where one artist may feed on the output of another to hopefully grow the pot for everyone.

The only way to fit generative bots into the philosophical framework of copyright is to demand that the generative bots keep food in the bellies of the artists. Currently, they threaten it. It’s just that simple. People act like it’s somehow an important question whether they “learn” the same way people do, but the question doesn’t matter at all. Robots don’t get the same leeway and protection afforded to humans because robots do not need to eat.