Tests can't catch race conditions in multithreaded code. Now that I told you what the tests can't catch, can you imagine writing tests for that specific thing?
MAI Basic Four Inc. was a relatively succesful computer manufacturer that sold business computers that used BASIC as the development language for business applications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic/Four
In 1983, when I started using Unix, I went through the manuals for Unix System 7 trying to learn about every program that came with the system. So I tried SCCS, but at that time I wasn't developing software as part of a larger team so I decided it wasn't useful to me.
Many years later I bought the book "Applying RCS and SCCS: From Source Control to Project Control", half-read it and decided I still didn't feel it was something useful to me. It wasn't until 1998 or 1999 that I started using CVS, then a few years later switched to SVN, an finally to Git (between SVN and Git I spent a few years using Unity's Asset Server).
"...can't reproduce the human mind because it's obvious that is not how we work" <-- that's a very strong assumption, without any concrete evidence to support it
"stole a huge quantity of copyrighted material" <- nobody stole anything, even if it's eventually determined that there was some form of copyright infringement it wouldn't have been stealing
I tried to find the where I heard that Radford was inspired by that blog post, but the closest thing I found is that in the "Sentiment Neuron" paper (Learning to Generate Reviews and Discovering Sentiment: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.01444.pdf), in the "Discussion and Future Work" section they mention this Karpathy paper from 2015: Visualizing and Understanding Recurrent Networks https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02078
Another book which also seems to be very good is "Deep Learning, Foundations and Concepts". It is coming out soon and you can already preview it on-line at https://www.bishopbook.com/
The book that just came out, "Understanding Deep Learning", is an excellent overview of the current state of AI: https://udlbook.github.io/udlbook/
Read that first, then to keep up to date you can follow up with any papers that seem interesting to you.
A good way to be aware of the interesting papers that come out is to follow @_akhaliq on X: https://twitter.com/_akhaliq
For the last few months Ethan Mollick has been writing some great articles about how to best use Generative AI in his blog: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/
It is distribution of copyrighted material without permission of the author that is illegal, when you download you're not distributing so it isn't illegal (unless you're using something like BitTorrent that also distributes it while you're downloading it).
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that copyright law typically regulates the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, public display, or creation of derivative works of copyrighted materials. Possession of copyrighted material in itself is not illegal. It's how you use that material that could potentially violate copyright laws.