Well, lots of normal people due this not for profit, which is just as damning in the eyes of copyright.
But what if they had done this in a legitimate fashion - say they got a library account and just ordered the books one by one, read them in, and then returned the books. As I understand it (which is not very well, tbh) the LLM don’t keep a copy of the original reference. They use the works to determine paths and branches in what I assume is a quasi-statistical approach (ie stable diffusion associates characteristics with words, but once the characteristics are stored in the model the original is effectively discarded and can’t actually be recreated, except in the way a child might reproduce a picture from memory.)
If the dataset is not, in fact, stored, would the authors still have a case?
I believe this should be allowed, honestly. For, it's dangerous to disallow. I mean, there are dictatorships training their AIs, and they won't care about copyrights. That's gonna be an advantage for them, and the west should feed the same information.
We don't need to allow Steven King, but scientific and engineering articles, sure.