> start exploring how these tools can help them without feeling like they're [...] ripping off the work of everyone who's code was used to train the model
But you literally still are. If you weren't, it should be trivially easy to create these models without using huge swathes of non-public-domain code. Right?
You're right that feelings are the key to convincing people but your comparison is wrong.
Search engines help website owners, they don't hurt them. Whether the goal of a website is to inform people, build reputation or make money, search engines help with that. (Unless they output an excerpt so large visiting your website is no longer necessary. There have been lawsuits about that.)
LLMs take other people's work and regurgitate a mixed/mangled (verbatim or not does not matter) version without crediting/compensating the original authors and which cannot easily be tracked to any individual authors even if you actively try.
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LLMs perform no work (creative or otherwise), no original research, have no taste - in fact they have no anchor to the real world except the training data. Literally everything they output is based on the training data which took possibly quadrillions of hours of _human work_ and is now being resold without compensating them.
Human time and natural resources are the only things with inherent value and now human time is being devalued and stolen.
It feels less like you're ripping off work if the model is helping you understand your own code as opposed to writing new code from scratch - even though the models were built in exactly the same way.
If someone scraped every photo on the internet (along with their captions) and used the data to create a model that was used purely for accessibility purposes - to build tools which described images to people with visual impairments - many people would be OK with that, where they might be justifiably upset at the same scraped data being used to create an image-generation model that competes with the artists on who's work it was trained.
Similarly, many people were OK with Google scraping the entire internet for 20+ years to build a search engine that helps users find their content, but are unhappy about an identical scrape being used to train a generative AI model.