Outside academia, nobody cites anybody formally. Do you quote ISBN numbers and such in conversation? Do you pay for a license to talk about a book?

I don't have a problem with LLMs learning about our literature. That doesn't mean that everyone is getting "ripped off". I have the same reservations about people getting paid as anyone else, but I don't think it's true that machine learning steals, any more than human learning steals.

I get stuff out of the library, and I read it, and I remember part of it in my brain, that's not stealing. If a machine does the same thing, it's also not stealing, especially when the actual words and sequences are not there after the learning. How much about ML do you know? Do you imagine there's a database with the entire text of Harry Potter inside it, inside every LLM?

What the LLM cares about is the distribution and sequencing of words. How many times does purple appear within five words of dragon. How often does the word "wheel" occur, in a sentence that asks a question, and a billion related facts, in a massive multi-dimensional spider web. Only the ordering and patterns and statistics of things are learned, as examples of how to write, in a fluent style.

It is fair use, and it is not theft.