I think the key is to think through the incentives for future authors.

As a thought experiment, say that the idea someday becomes mainstream that there is no reason to read any book or research publication because you can just ask an AI to describe and quote at length from the contents of anything you might want to read. In such a future, I think it's reasonable to predict that there would be less incentive to publish and thus less people publishing things.

In that case, I would argue the "hurt" is primarily to society as a whole, and also to people who might have otherwise enjoyed a career in writing.

Having said that, I don't think we're particularly close to living in that future. For one thing I'd say that the ability to receive compensation from holding a copyright doesn't seem to be the most important incentive for people to create things (written or otherwise), though it is for some people. But mostly, I just don't think this idea of chatting with an AI instead of reading things is very mainstream, maybe at least in part because it isn't very easy to get them to quote at length. What I don't know is whether this is likely to change or how quickly.

that was just a metaphor, you can ask your AI what's that or use way less energy and use Wikipedia's search engine... or do you think OpenAI first evaluates if the author is an independent developer &/or has died &/or was funded by a public university before adding the content to the training database? /s

and one thing is publishing a paper with jargon for academics, another is to simplify the results for the masses. there's a huge difference between finishing a paper and a book

It isn't that someone was hurt. We have one private entity gaining power by centralizing knowledge (which they never contributed to) and making people pay for regurgitating the distilled knowledge, for profit.

Few entities can do that (I can't).

Most people are forced to work for companies that sell their work to the higher bidder (which are the very entities mentioned above), or ask them to use AI (under the condition that such work is accessible to the AI entities).

It's obviously a vicious circle, if people can't oppose their work to be ingested and repackaged by a few AI giants.

I know that this seems likely from a theoretical perspective (in other words, I would way underestimate it at the sprint planning meeting!), but

A) checking each output against a regex representing a hundred years of literature would be expensive AF no matter how streamlined you make it, and

B) latent space allows for small deviations that would still get you in trouble but are very hard to catch without a truly latent wrapper (i.e. another LLM call). A good visual example of this is the coverage early on in the Disney v. ChatGPT lawsuit:

[1] IEEE: https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright

[2] reliable ol' Gary Marcus: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/things-are-about-to-get-a-...

What if the model simply substitutes synonyms here and there without changing the spirit of the material? (This might not work for poetry, obviously.) It is not such a simple matter.