At ten dollars per book, that'd just be a few hundred thousand dollars. They spent way more than that training the model, and probably will spend more on legal fees in this case.

But if they had done that, I bet they would have been sued anyway.

I think that part is maybe missed here — “why didn’t you pay for it?”

“Because you wouldn’t have sold it to me. Or even if you would have, you would have put such onerous terms on it that I’d rather take this path.”

(Not saying this makes it right)

Buying a single copy of a work does not grant you a license to duplicate or distribute that work.

So just buying copies wouldn’t have helped them.

But they are not duplicating or distributing it. The whole point is that the AI is just reading and learning from it, just like a human would do.

Even accepting that, the law should be encouraging creative output by individuals and there is justifiable fear that this will be used to bypass protections designed to reward such behavior.

For a more direct counterexample, I can memorize something and type it back out, but if it is copyrighted the law doesn’t make an exception just because it passed through my head.

If the AI is able to type back out a duplicate of the training data, then I agree that's copyright infringement. If it just learns from the data like a human with normal memory reading a large amount of material, then I don't see it. That's normally the case. There have been experiments where someone managed to make an AI spit out near-copies, but it's not the default situation and seems preventable.

I do agree that we should encourage human creativity. But if AI isn't making copies, and the output of AI isn't awarded copyright (as is currently the case) then I think humans still have sufficient reward.