But the thing is, it’s not similar to turning their work into a play or a TV show. You aren’t replicating their story at all, they put words in a logical order and you are using that to teach the AI what the next word logically could be.

As for humans taking much more time to properly mimic style, of course that’s true (assuming untrained). But an AI requires far more memory and data to do that. A human can replicate a style with just examples of that style given time. An AI needs to scrape basically the entire internet (and label it, which takes quite some time) to be able to do so. They may need different things but it’s ridiculous to say that they’re completely incomparable. Besides, you make it sound like AI is it’s own entity that wasn’t created, trained, and used by humans in the first place.

I don’t see why they (authors/copyright holders) have any right to prevent use of their product beyond purchasing. If I legally own a copy of Game of Thrones, I should be able to do whatever the crap I want with it.

And basically, I can. I can quote parts of it, I can give it to a friend to read, I can rip out a page and tape it to the wall, I can teach my kid how to read with it.

Why should I not be allowed to train my AI with it? Why do you think it’s unethical?