Cassette Tapes and Private Copying Levy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
Governments didn't ban tapes but taxed them and fed the proceeds back into the royalty system. An equivalent for books might be an LLM tax funding a negative tax rate for sold books e.g. earn $5 and the gov tops it up. Can't imagine how to ensure it was fair though.
Alternatively, might be an interesting math problem to calculate royalties for the training data used in each user request!
IMHO, a better example would be the AI generated summaries provided by Google. Often these summaries have sufficient information and detail that people do not read the source article. The authors aren't getting paid (perhaps through on-page ads, which are not viewed) and then go out of business.
This strikes me as a good fit for the tax-on-cassette metaphor.
https://1minutebook.com/are-book-summaries-legal/
Fair use is a defense often cited in those cases but it's just that: a defense. Cliff Notes are often cited here but they actually license the content in many cases.
> If you want to write a summary of any novel, without quoting from it, you are free to do it
> Copyright does not protect ideas, only a particular expression of those ideas
> You would likely get in trouble only if your summary contained long excerpts directly from the book
> As long as you do not quote directly from the book, or copy any of the content, then writing a unique summary is not illegal. You can mention the title, you can even quote sentences from the book as long as they are cited, you just can’t reproduce chunks of the content
etc
(I'm also not sure whether this article is just blogspam or itself AI generated)