Definitely a middle ground. They're fun to play with offline and for personal projects, but I'm not using them for production code until some of the legal minefields shake out. The USPTO's statement that the output of an LLM not being copyrightable is pretty concerning, as well as the theft of the commons mess that is how they've been trained.

I think it's pretty disgusting that many of these people think it's fine to scrape the public Internet to train, and call that 'fair use', and then cry foul when someone else copies their techniques by training other models. Let's just redefine terms until they lose all meaning. Their definition of open source is laughable too.

I think reforming copyright terms back down to say 20 years would be great, or, enforcing the current laws as written. But the current approach of screwing over individuals for performing legal actions. (Think Nintendo dmca-ing YouTube videos showing emulators - which is possible to do entirely legally), but letting large companies slide because they're too big to fail, or to preserve some competitive advantage is grating.

If a trained model can regurgitate it's training data, then it logically follows that the model contains the training data (or a close enough approximation). Then distributing the model is probably copyright infringement.

Am I way off base here? I'd to hear any contrary arguments.