Copyright activists are on a mission to wipe a popular generative AI training set from the internet. Success could alter the industry—and who controls it.

Increasingly, the authors of works being used to train large language models are complaining (and rightfully so) that they never gave permission for such a use-case. If I were an LLM company, I’d be seriously looking for a Plan B right now, whether that’s engaging publishing companies to come up with new licensing options, paying 1,000,000 grad students to write 1,000,000 lines of prose, or something else entirely.