Well, firing someone for this is super weird. It seems like an attempt to censor an interpretation of the law that:
1. Criticizes a highly useful technology 2. Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law
My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against. When I look at the litany of derivative fantasy novels, it's obvious they're not all fully independent works.
Since AI is and will continue to be so useful and transformative, I think we just need to acknowledge that our laws did not accomodate this use-case, then we should change them.
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