In the US, Copyright is not viewed as a natural property right but a contingent property interest for the limited purpose of promoting “the progress of science and useful arts”.
Pointing out that a major advancement would be foreclosed by a proposed interpretation of the scope of copyright law is an argument that that interpretation is either an incorrect interpretation of the statute or an area where the statute conflicts with its Constitutional purpose.
Of course, the Globe and Mail is Canadian, but, is Canadian law the applicable governing law here?
I don't take it as a given that it's necessary to use copyrighted works without permission to get most of the benefit of LLMs and other AI. There are many options:
1. The benefactors of these models can offer to pay a small fee to the copyright holders for inclusion of their work in the training set. Given that these models have the potential to be literally the most monetarily valuable products ever created in the history of mankind, paying the people who allowed them to exist doesn't seem like an unreasonable ask to me. Obviously people who refused would not have their works included.
2. The model can be trained on public works. Sometimes this is plenty, sometimes not.
3. Hordes of human beings can be paid to contribute to the training data set, Mechanical-Turk-style or just via direct employment. This is already necessary to curate and polish the input data.
None of these seem like outlandish requests for something that will eventually be worth trillions of dollars per year.
Consider the opposite: we give an exception to giant corporations and say "yeah feel free to just take whatever copyrighted work and use it however with no compensation." Artists and authors are being replaced by these outputs. What motivation do they have to create, knowing that their work will be immediately stolen by giant corporations for use in building the tool that makes them obsolete? How is that promoting “the progress of science and useful arts”?
I would like to see more high-speed railway exist. By your argument, land ownership is problematic because it prevents cool things like high-speed rail, and therefore we should just plow on through everyone's land for the greater good without compensation. I say: Eminent Domain is a useful last resort to make cool things happen, but at least compensate the people you're trampling on.
Pointing out that a major advancement would be foreclosed by a proposed interpretation of the scope of copyright law is an argument that that interpretation is either an incorrect interpretation of the statute or an area where the statute conflicts with its Constitutional purpose.
Of course, the Globe and Mail is Canadian, but, is Canadian law the applicable governing law here?