LLMs are not databases. They deduce or infer patterns in language by seeing vast quantities of text created by people - we write things that contain logic and structure, and LLMs look at that and infer patterns from it, but they don’t keep it. So ChatGPT might have looked at a thousand stories from the New York Times, but it hasn’t kept them.

The purpose is not for the LLM to know the content of any given story or any given novel - the purpose is for it to see the patterns in the output of collective human intelligence.

That is, this is not Napster. OpenAI hasn’t ‘pirated’ your book or your story in the sense that we normally use that word, and it isn’t handing it out for free.

it’s supposed to be inferring ‘intelligence’ (a placeholder word) from seeing as much as possible of how people talk, as a proxy for how they think.

photography is about where you point the camera, what image you see and which you choose. No-one claims a machine made the image. Equally, I can press ‘Go’ on Midjourney or ChatGPT without any skill at all, but getting something good is just as hard.

Do we care who made it, and why, or do we just want the picture? That's why some people are horrified by music generators or Midjourney, (or, 150 years ago, were horrified by cameras), and others aren't worried at all.