I certainly hope that none of these authors have ever read a book before or have been inspired by something written by another author.

That would be a much better comparison if it was artificial intelligence, but these are just reinforcement learning models. They do not get inspired.

just reinforcement learning models

...like the naturally occuring neural networks are.

Tell you what, you get a landmark legal decision classifying LLM as people and then we’ll talk.

Until then it’s software being fed content in a way not permitted by its license i.e. the makers of that software committing copyright infringement.