We should absolutely have a discussion about modernizing copyright (and patent!) protections. But it has to be done through a democratic process, companies shouldn't be allowed to just ignore laws that are inconvenient to their business model.
> At that hypothetical point, your attachment to legacy copyright law would arguably hold back human progress as a whole
There won't be any progress if nobody is getting paid for their work. Either copyright stands and LLMs aren't allowed to train without compensation, or they get an exemption and there will be nothing left to train on in a few years.
If it doesn't happen, it won't matter what we think.
(I think it's simply too early to tell, but it's fun to think about what will have to change if the AI cheerleaders turn out to be correct.)
And under those circumstances, your opinion is that copyrighted books should continue to exist, with full legal protection?
How could anyone, including the authors, possibly benefit from an obsolete paradigm like that? At that hypothetical point, your attachment to legacy copyright law would arguably hold back human progress as a whole, not just impede a few greedy corporations from training models on illegally-downloaded books.