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This isn't about ideas. It is about text. Paraphrasing text can definitely be a copyright violation. I've won a couple of copyright related cases and settled one for a substantial sum out of court. In every one of those the other party had some weird idea of what copyright really means.

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Okay, paraphrasing text describing an idea isn’t necessarily a copyright violation.

I think the issue is that it’s case-specific, but there are plenty of people claiming copyright violations in circumstances where there’s no specific evidence for it, and a few other people claiming that LLM inference necessarily means it’s transformative use.

Yes, and I fully expect that all of this is going to be settled law in a decade (or two), but right now plenty of this is still up in the air. As new evidence is found about what the residue in the LLMs actually is I expect the law to take note.

Besides all that: no matter how you slice the actual case for infringement, these companies have the authorities in their pocket and even if what they are doing is technically illegal I fully expect them to get away with it because they are very wealthy. Which is one reason they're not seeing any of my money.

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