But GPT’s can restructure copyrighted text to make it different enough for it not to be direct theft. It won’t be long till you can get an entire book, feed it in and prompt it to regenerate the book in a different style. Then what happens? Or what about taking books out of copyright, then prompting regeneration in a different style with a slightly modified plot?

If you can prove there was a source and that source was used without appropriate licensing, that is a valid case of copyright infringement and possibly even IP theft.

We really need to stop muddying the water surrounding "AI" and their use of source materials. Those so-called "AIs" are just software like any other program, they are tools like any other computer application, and the copyright and licensing legal precedences that apply to software apply to them.

Their ability to transform things (art, text, whatever) at incredible speeds, means chasing copyright is going to be a game of Whac-A-Mole. Also, what percentage of transformation of copyrighted works is still infringement? A GPT can ingest a 500 word piece of copyrighted text and either summarise it down to 50 words or triple the word count in a stylistically unique manner.

Obligatory IANAL.

If you use any copyrighted source material without appropriate licensing (note: Fair Use is a form of licensing) in any way, that's copyright infringement. This is very simple and the legal world has demonstrated that fact time and time again long before computers ever came onto the scene.

Some "AI" drawing a picture derived from copyrighted materials is no different from a game using copyrighted assets from another game. If there is no appropriate licensing, it's copyright infringement.

This is akin to saying that licensing your code under the GPL will prevent GitHub's copilot from recreating it in a proprietary project. I wish it were true, but it's not.

A license won't stop others from stealing your stuff, but you will have legal standing to go after them when they do if you are so inclined.