We may not like this, but let us contemplate what laws would be in place to prevent a thing like this; I suspect we would like those laws even less.

The laws at play here are related to Intellectual Property, specifically Copyright. Yes, it is terribly flawed, but it is the product of centuries of case law dealing with very hairy issues, and I believe it is fundamentally sound, and here's why.

As the name implies, it deals with only verbatim copies of works or subsantial portions thereof. It very expressly does not cover abstract things like concepts, ideas, themes, facts, or patterns, and rightfully so, because we really do not want anyone owning something that broad.

But these abstract things are precisely what have been extracted, at unimaginable scale, to build these models! Each pattern in the tokens derived from these works contributed imperceptibly tiny perturbations to randomly initialized weights, interacting in incomprehensible ways into vectors representing concepts and ideas and facts, the cumulative aggregate of which has somehow created a form of intelligence.

There is no copying, only gleaning, and so Copyright Law falls short. But what is the alternative, and do we want it?

To prevent something like this would require some sort of legal protection on the more abstract things. We do have a legal framework for those: Patents! But as is very clear on HN and in many Tech circles, those are an extremely contentious topic (even though they actually protect much narrower ideas than most presume.) I don't think anybody anywhere really wants any protection on broader abstractions, and rightfully so.

So: we as a society expressly decided these abstract things belong to the commons, and those are the exact things these labs harvested. This is probably the only logical culmination of our technological journey, and is within the very reasonable legal frameworks we have evolved over centuries.

As such, it is not productive to dwell on fighting this or bemoaning this. Instead we should focus on ensuring that this technology -- with its immense potential and opportunities and dangers -- benefits everybody as much as possible. That is a better way to compensate everybody's labor, and that is a much richer and fruitful discussion to be had.