No it's because what they are trying to automate is creativity. I can ask any artist/writer to write me a story or create a character like "X" but black and they get to use the knowledge of that character. An AI needs context just like any other intelligence.
This. And, commercial or not, what they're creating is fundamentally more important and more valuable for humanity than any of the inputs that go into it.
And, by "they", I don't mean just OpenAI. If it were just them, you could perhaps argue they shouldn't be getting a free pass (I'd rather go with "potentially too dangerous to be allowed to exist" angle though). But it's not just them. The same training process and the same use of copyrighted content powers all the commercial and non-commercial models, including SOTA competitors like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and "open source" wannabes derived from various Llama versions, which are not far behind.
To me, the "open source" models alone are already good enough to outweigh any copy rights being violated through use of unlicensed materials in training.
The grim future you are painting is one where humans have no jobs because everything is automated. So then we can just play games perform art and let ai do all the crap. Sounds good. People who own the land/resources will want to be paid and there will always be jobs for performers, custom chefs, machine maintainers, teachers of how ai works, politicians that govern use of ai in and across borders. Stop being a child and think about how the world works.
Haven't seen any AI potters, quilters, muralists or landscape gardeners yet.
It's replacing work that is purely to do with information.
Years ago there was talk about the "anywheres" vs. the "somewheres" - people who can do their jobs from anywhere (home, a cafe, a plane, the other side of the world) vs people whose work is necessaily rooted to a particular place. Your plumbers and farmers and retail workers.
AI can replace "anywhere" work, but there is little progress in robotics. Replacing "somewhere" work is many years away.
>but there is little progress in robotics. Replacing "somewhere" work is many years away.
I agree there's little progress in robotics, relative to AI. But "many years away" might mean just 10 years away. You can buy this robot for 16 grand USD:
