I've always interpreted the whole LLM 'training' as unregulated data laundering at industrial scale. Companies will steal content from across the world, trade it in backroom deals, and then wash it in their data centers, before regurgitating it to the masses.

As long as the exact portions of stolen data used is considered 'trade secret' under NDA, the copyrights are conveniently too scrambled to prove or enforce. Even if the LLM spat it out near verbatim, they will always argue it came to the same conclusion on its own because you could never prove their sources otherwise.

This is why that, independent of its city sized power demands and rampant spread of misinformation, there will never be an ethical place for LLMs by their inherent design.