> They are not human beings and they do not participate in the social systems of human beings the way human beings do.

Your original quote was not using the impact of the technology, it was disparaging the algorithmic source of the inspired work (by saying it does not participate in social systems the way humans do).

> I think a major distinction though, between and LLM and, say, a paintbrush or even a text-editor, or photoshop, is that these tools do not have content baked into them

LLMs, despite being able to reproduce content in the case of overtraining, do not store the content they are trained from. Also, the usage of "content" here is ambiguous so I assumed you meant the storage of training data.

To me, the content of an LLM is its algorithm and weights. If the weights can reproduce large swaths of content to a verifiable metric of closeness (and to an amount that's covered by current law) I can understand the desire to legally enforce current policies. The problem I have is against the frequent argument to ban generative algorithms altogether.

> The use of a different paintbrush, by the same artist, with the same pictorial intention may produce slightly different results due to material conditions, but the artist is able to consciously and partially deterministically constrain the result.

I would counter this by saying the prompts constrain the result. How deterministically depends on how well one understands the semantic meaning of the weights and what the model was trained on. Also, as a disclaimer, I don't think that makes prompts proprietary (for various different reasons).

> I think this is a key difference in the "AI as art tool" case. A traditional tool does not harbor intentionality, or digital information

Assigning "intent" is an anthropomorphism of the algorithm in my opinion as they don't have any intent.

I do agree with your last paragraph though, one (or even a group of) individual's feelings don't make something legal or illegal. I can make a moral claim as to why I don't think it should be subject to constraints and laws, but of course that doesn't change what the law actually is.

The analogies are trying to make this appeal in an effort to influence those who try to make the laws overly restrictive. There are many laws that don't make sense and logic can't change their enforcement. The idea is to make a logical appeal to those who may have inconsistencies in their value system to try and prevent more non-sensical laws from being developed.