The absolute right decision.

To me it’s essentially the same as someone reading a book or watching a movie when the AI learns from those examples.

The problem is that the AI can print the book word for word if you ask the right questions and at that point it’s breaking copyright again but that’s not a problem with the learning part but with how AI has no concept of understanding context at all

I was skeptical of this, but it checks out: I easily got ChatGPT to print out the full text to The Tell-Tale Heart, without any errors at all in the various spots I accuracy-checked.

Granted I chose it because it’s a very short public domain work - I was more skeptical of its technical ability to recall the exact text without errors than of the ability to trick it into violating copyright law.

I still suspect it’s much easier to (accidentally) trick it into writing a fanfiction of a copyrighted work that it claims is the original than it is to get it to produce the true original, though.

Your argument that it is useful as a plagiarism machine is that it can reproduce a public domain work? That’s… not the argument you think it is.