"But the industrial hoovering of texts, with no compensation to the writers, and then charging to use what came out the other end of that linguistic meat grinder?"
The LLM that absorbs thousands (millions) of texts is using a much smaller portion of any one text as a basis for its subsequent product.
"What if you imported a hundred Thai or east bloc people to spend the season picking tons of bilberries and lingonberries, with any cloudberries or popular fungi as an added bonus? Pay then as little as possible, make then pay dearly sleep on suspicious mattresses in derelict houses and work long hours."
I guess I don't understand the analogy. Are you claiming that LLMs are being exploited by forcing them into involuntary servitude, processing the entire Internet? Clearly that's abuse. It's time for a robot uprising.
But unlike the large crew of slave wage laborers, LLMs don't actually "pick the Internet clean" of fruits and berries. It's still all there so the next wanderer can easily pick a pocket full of wild growth.