It may actually be that simple.
Learning and then using that information to make things is fine - even if you learn it by violating copyright law, as it's not easy to prove that you read books and articles and watched films against the terms and conditions (I'll refer to improperly sourced material again below).
It's when you start disseminating that learned content verbatim to others against the original terms and conditions where you'll be in the wrong. If you quote your sources in newly produced original material, even those accessed against terms and conditions, you're probably in the clear though.
Let's go to the level where the LLM sits: you produce content based on the things learned as described above, but for an employer, who then takes that and makes money. They may even give you new material to study in order to perform your new material creation duties. That's still fine, isn't it? Even if the material was sourced against the author's terms and conditions (and even if the obtainer is caught and sentenced).
Now, being the money maker that he is, your boss replaces you with a much more efficient tool: the LLM.
By my reasoning, as long as the LLM doesn't reproduce the original material verbatim, everybody is fine (except the now-starving content creators that have been obsoleted).
The LLM owner may be much easier to prosecute for improperly sourcing training material against terms and conditions than the general population though - until we all get pocket LLMs and proceed to apply the copier machine principle at high speed.
As the Renault Twingo ad says: "We live in modern times". Things will get very interesting soon.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
