It should be illegal for entities like BBC to do this. Copyright is meant to be a temporary, limited construct that carves out an opportunity for creators to profit from their works. It is not perpetual legal dominion over specific ideas. Entities that harvest content to train LLMs should pay for access like everyone else, but after that, they can use the information they learn however they see fit. Now, if their product plagiarizes, or doesn’t properly attribute authorship, that is a problem. But it’s a different issue from what the BBC is fighting here.

I think there are some content creators that believe they are owed royalties if you even think about a piece they wrote or drew. That is, of course, absurd in terms of human minds. It’s also absurd in terms of other kinds of minds.