US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

One aspect that I feel is ignored by the comments here is the geo-political forces at work. If the US takes the position that LLMs can't use copyrighted work or has to compensate all copyright holders – other countries (e.g. China) will not follow suit. This will mean that US LLM companies will either fall behind or be too expensive. Which means China and other countries will probably surge ahead in AI, at least in terms of how useful the AI is.

That is not to say that we shouldn't do the right thing regardless, but I do think there is a feeling of "who is going to rule the world in the future?" tha underlies governmental decision-making on how much to regulate AI.

If AI is so important, maybe it should be owned by the government and free to use for all citizens.

Name two non-military things that the government owns and aren't complete dumpster fires that barely do the thing they're supposed to do.

Even (especially?) the military is a dumpster fire but it's at least very good at doing what it exists to do.

The government doesn't make tanks, it just shells out gigantic amounts to companies to make them.

That said, there are plenty of successful government actions across the world, where Europe or Japan probably have a good advantage with solid public services. Think streets, healthcare, energy infrastructure, water infrastructure, rail, ...

We're talking about the US government though