Well, if the concept is "we should legally treat the systems just like very big humans", then the next step is to arrest and confine all the leaders of the companies involved on charges of slavery and child exploitation.

The distinction does matter in copyright too, since a transformative work needs some non-trivial amount of human input.

Yep, the issue with the parent counterargument is that gen ai is a monetized tool owned and sold by a corporation. People would probably be fine with a human-like embodied ai or something learning in the same way.

If I offered a paid service where you could pay me $20 a month and I would draw you copyrighted works that are in my internal neural network that would also be illegal