> Indeed, but learning is effectively a form of lossy compression

Yeah, that copies in the brain of a human who has experienced the work and not reduced to any othe media are neither “copies” nor “phonorecords” as covered by US copyright law is pretty clear, and that this does not apply to data stored by clever algorithms in computer storage is also pretty clear, so I’m not sure what your point is.

If you want to argue LLMs are people to escape this, then, sure, copyright stops being a problem for their training data, but it still is for their output plus you end up a whole set of new legal problems with using them as people do now, starting with 13th Amendment problems.

There's a pretty big jump from "machine learning is not inherently different from human learning" to "machine learning models are people".

There's not a big jump from “human learning isn't treated as a copyright violation because it happens in people and not in external media” plus “machine learning should be legally treated like human learning” to “your argument depends on treating ML models as people”.

The fact that people making the second part of the first argument often either are ignorant of or deliberately ignore why human learning is treated the way it is doesn't change the essence of the situation.

That applies to both sides though: people arguing that machine learning should not be treated like human learning often justify it with "ML models aren't people, they're software on a computer". But that argument is also missing the point, and invites this kind of philosophical discussion. The essence of the matter is that there is no high-level principle involved - humans get special treatment because humans write the law. So we can legally round all machine learning down to "zipping a folder full of JPEGs" for pragmatic reasons, and get away with it until we actually create sentient AIs and recognize them as people.

(Which, knowing history and observing how we treat animals, will happen only when the sentient AIs coerce us to recognize them, through violence or the threat of it...)

> The essence of the matter is that there is no high-level principle involved - humans get special treatment because humans write the law.

“The purpose of law is to advance the collective interests of humans in a society” is, I would argue, a high-level principal, and (with variations as to whether it applies to all humans or some subset, and which interests are considered privileged relative to others) nearly universal. Yes, the fact that humans are writing the laws is a reason that principle is chosen, but the idea that there are not high-level principle is just false.

>“your argument depends on treating ML models as people”

They would be "legal people" in the sense that corporations are "people".

> that this does not apply to data stored by clever algorithms in computer storage is also pretty clear,

I'm sorry, this is far from "clear", otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion. Fair use is a thing. Does fair use apply in this situation? No one knows at this point.