Being a bit hand-wavy with it: It’s akin to torrenting music/movies. The torrented files are lossy compressed representations of the original waveform from the music producer. Limewire, or Pirate Bay, or whatever provide interface to retrieve them (download or stream). The model weights are a form of lossy compression, and inference is like a document retrieval.
One may say, “it’s like an employee working at company X, then going to work at company Y, they retain their knowledge and experience.” I would say it’s more like, employee going from X to Y, but retaining audio and video recordings of all interactions he had, notes, documents, and other proprietary info and bringing it to company Y.
Personally this whole llm debate about copyright is quite funny. As someone who very much has skin in the game(my art is trained on midjourney.), and who runs in a circle of artists, it’s interesting to see people’s ego’s come at play here. The ones who are excited about these as tools are the ones who are openly inspired and want to inspire however the ones who claim copyright infringement seem to come off as insecure, almost like they are afraid that this idea of theirs will be the last great idea they have. There’s already a separation happening in the art world of people who are exploding in creative output vs the people who are so defensive and cling to the old way of doing things.
If I had my way, I’d see copyright laws abolished completely. A complete free for all in innovation. And people who claim that without parents and copyright then there’s no incentive to make money seriously underestimate humans and their ego to continually innovate.
I'm certainly no expert on copyright law, but my understanding is that its purpose is to protect the financial interests of certain creators from the progress of technology (e.g. copy paste). I've heard arguments that removing copyright would lead to less creativity or reduced quantity or quality of work, but I'm personally a bit skeptical (probably for the same reasons as you - I think people have a natural desire to create). Even in terms of financials, I would speculate that an employment/patronage model would become more widespread.
I think there's something to be said about the benefits of having freely available knowledge, music, and art for common consumption. When I was a child in high school (or well, always lol), my parents couldn't afford a lot of material I needed or wanted for studying (especially for standardized testing, SAT and AP tests) and most of the books in my local library either did not exist or were outdated. But when I discovered that much of this information could be found online, it really changed my world and made success in life feel attainable to me. I consider myself quite wealthy now, but I don't think I would have been able to escape poverty if all this information was paywalled from me. Maybe others would argue the writers are not being compensated for their efforts, but if there are other people in the world in the same position as past me who could positively benefit from it, I think that's a better world to live in, personally.
Incidentally, the release of StableDiffusion has actually inspired me to draw a little. Not sure why, but I find it inspiring being able to iterate on a prompt and produce something of quality that I can try to replicate on my own. Even if I fail, I still have something to appreciate that maps fairly well to the concept in my head.
My hope is that these technologies might lead to a change in our financial system (I think UBI would be a good idea), but I suppose we'll see where everything ends up. I think there's likely going to be a lot of pain in the short-term (especially since there are those who don't want to adapt), but hopefully everyone will positively benefit in the long-term.