To be fair, the big AI companies are just applying the science in order to profit from it. The science behind LLMs is innocent enough. It's some very specific, money-making applications of that science that are pissing people off.

Reading all these replies... Ugh. It's so obvious none of these people understand how LLMs work. Not how the training happens either.

Somehow people got it into their heads that LLMs are "plagiarism machines" and that image stuck. LLMs aren't copying anything when they generate output! If they do, that's a flaw in their training and AI researchers are always trying to spot and fix things like that. Why? Because it's those same flaws that allow 3rd parties to understand and copy how their models work (and can create security issues).