On the flip side - almost (say, 99.99%) of Human Engineers, Artists, Technicians, Scientists, etc... have mental models trained on copyrighted material.

Nobody (to my knowledge) has ever said that you can't train on copyrighted material - what you aren't allowed to do is copy or directly plagiarize. Something that all the generative systems are going to great pains to remove from their system where possible.

Are they doing a perfect job - nope. But they'll get better, and this is good - copyrights are supposed to prevent replication, not use of their material.

Lots of people have said that it's illegal to train on copyrighted material without a license to it.

Also, performance licenses for movies, plays, recorded music, and copyrighted scores are all required. The lack of copying is not relevant there, the performance alone can be infringing.

I'm intrigued - can you point me to any credible commentator or article that makes the argument "it's illegal to train on copyrighted material without a license to it" - that seems entirely contrary to the spirt (as I understand it) to copyright law, which is it grants you a right to copy.

I like that you bring up music - almost every musician you have ever listened to (some exceptions of course) developed their talent by learning from others - chords, bridges, etc... And I'm just as certain that close to 0% of them had a "license to learn" from their material.

I'm talking about ML training. I think human training is expressly covered by fair use (i.e. copying for educational purposes). Sorry for the confusion, I misread your comment.

>Are they doing a perfect job - nope. But they'll get better

I lost all optimism with tech hoping "they'll get better" quite a while ago. No, it's time to regulate them before they burn the bridge this time.