My grievance isn’t so much with current household models with PCs sitting there running off solar (that’s starting to get very bloody specific though).

It's actually my setup.

It's a standing on the shoulders of giants thing. That's how humanity have been making progress historically.

People running local LLMs with open weights abliterated models, especially with solar PV power (perhaps not as rare as you think, I'm upgrading my solar PV system in the next couple weeks for that explicit purpose), is about freedom and privacy. At some point there should be enough of them to link up into a grid over the Internet, collaborate or donate resources to distributed community projects. This is a way to allow for the "pillaged" content to pay back for itself.

Do you have qualms with public pirate libraries, like SciHub and LibGen, too? These have also been used for training LLMs.

We involuntarily contributed to their creation, the least we get to do is enjoy the fruits of that theft. More should be given, financially reimbursement through taxation, but until that happens, free use of the technology is consolation.

Besides, following through with your analogy, if a baby is born from rape - does that baby deserve hate for who their father is?

Unpopular opinion time: I'm torn as to where that theft line is.

If a turn of phrase in Lord of the Rings inspires something new in me, do I owe royalties to the Tolkien estate?

The stories on FanFiction.net are derivative by definition — is it theft? I love "Harry Potter and the Natural 20", a 4th-wall breaking D&D and Potter universe mashup story (seriously, it's hilarious). Does that story owe royalties to Wizards of the Coast and (ugh) JKR?

Maybe those are super transformative. What about opinion pieces where the author redigests information from all over, many paid writings? Are they selling the original authors' product, even though restated?

Maybe it's ok if they paid for the subs. But what if it came from free library books?

My wall has a bunch of art from artists at SDCC. I'm looking at Spider Gwen; Thor, Iron Man, and Mjolnir Cap charging into battle; Kaladin and Syl before the Stormfather; and a map of all the places the Gaang went in ATLA. Those artists all ingested the original work to make those derivatives; were they not allowed to make them if they borrowed their friends' copy?

It feels kinda wrong to vacuum up public data to train models, kinda? But I don't know that I can fairly call it immoral without condemning all these other things I think aren't immoral. I kind of want to, but that'd be really inconsistent, and that's profoundly frustrating in its own way.

It's messy and complicated and I think the gut response of most people isn't actually a reasoned one.