It's not as simple as one singular aspect, and I don't know if I might've been fine with it if it was actually open and free from the start. But where I draw the line on ethics is with the usage of data without permission to create models intended to reproduce the data - which means laundering the data, reproducing the patterns from it to create competition/replacements for the people who made the creative work it's trained on.

The monetization is a more complicated aspect, because it is also fact that at this point the big GenAI companies are dominating the market and consuming an unreasonable amount of resources to grow, and with that any use of LLMs is supporting that market. Using the services of those companies obviously supports them, publicly using LLMs supports the legitimacy of the market, and if the current trend continues, private use of selfhosted LLMs is making yourself dependent on them, and it sure seems like the tech market is doing its best to make the necessary hardware unavailable to people, meaning you're setting yourself up to be dependent on the companies in the future.

But, that's the fun thing - this is a short explanation of my opinion, because this is a complex topic, and I'm not writing this out every time, and people wouldn't read it. My specific opinion is that governments need to catch up on copyright law, and hopefully GenAI is a bubble that bursts soon. If anti-GenAI sentiments become more widespread, maybe it'll happen. If not, then I'll have to eventually give up on my morals, but for now I can only hope it doesn't come to that.