I am both in awe of how LLMs have exploded and also both frightened and pissed off. Sometimes it does amazing things like generating a song with which I can serenade my wife about how she kicked my shoes aside on her way in the door in the theme of Tom Petty's "Stop Kicking my Heart Around" called "Stop Kicking my Shoes Around".
But whatever and however it works, they tuned the model on my data (and lots of other peoples' data) without our permission only later saying "well now we'll pay attention to robots.txt files" but they did that after getting 10 billion dollars from Microsoft.
I give a ton of my stuff away. I ask very little in return. I gave like 40% of my best selling books away under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You can use it for anything and all you have to do is attribute me ... and they can't do that. But they sure can take 10 billion dollars from Microsoft. Where's my cut?
Imagine how much Chat GPT would have to spend to create the material it harvested without permission. They wouldn't have gotten anywhere.
And, again, this isn't some altruistic technology that benefits everyone – they took 10 billion dollars and won't give any part of it away. At least Facebook gave Llama 2 away to almost everyone.
So yeah, in my mind, they deserve the criticism.