In all three of your transformation examples, you likely would’ve paid the NYT either indirectly via ads or directly via a subscription (contentious ad-blocking aside). And Mazda, GM, and VW surely generated far more value from the car designer in revenue than the designer got in salary and knowledge. Broadly, humans pay something (tuition, apprenticeship, etc) to learn knowledge and skills. Even schools and libraries are not free, though they may feel so at time of use. _Some_ free learning is beginning to emerge on the internet, but much of it is as upsell to paid learning.

OpenAI on the other hand has been purely extractive in its learning relationships. A single human contravening normal learning costs would go unnoticed but also would not scale their own downstream impact. But an organized large group doing so would certainly run into issues (10k interlopers couldn’t just sneak into a single college course, for instance). And I think a large group of aligned/associated people is more akin to AI than a single person is, given the differences in scalability.