I really dont understand how the copyright laws can be so aggressive as to pursue individuals downloading songs or movies, but totally ineffectual against companies stealing huge volumes of data from all over the place, and repackaging it in LLMs etc. So bizarre.

I’m not sure they can be compared fairly. Slavery and AI scraping do both have “unpaid labor” in common. But “unpaid labor” is hardly the most horrific feature of either of them. And to reduce them down to that metric so they can be compared ends up downplaying the unique horrors of each.

I think the important part to take from the quote is that: he knew it was wrong, he knew the degree to which it was wrong was extreme, and he knew it was wrong in a particular way that the world hasn’t seen before.