I've seen a lot of confidence on HN and other tech communities that a court would never rule that training an AI on copyrighted images is infringement, but I'm

I've seen a lot of confidence on HN and other tech communities that a court would never rule that training an AI on copyrighted images is infringement, but I'm not so sure. Indeed and your examples are intended to point to gray areas. But a much more problematic (for the user) example is: some Dall-E-like program spits out seemingly original images but 0.1% are visibly near duplicates of copyrighted images and these form the basis of a lawsuit that costs someone a lot of money. Copyright in general tends to use the concept provenance - knowing the sequence of authors and processes that went into the creation of the object [1] and naturally AI makes this impossible. The AI training sequence either muddies the waters hopeless or creates a situation where the trainer is liable to everyone who created the data. And I don't think the question will answered just once. The thing to consider is that anyone can just create an "AI" that just spits out stock images (which is obviously a copyright violation) and so the court would have to look at detailed involved and neither the court nor the AI creator would want that at all. ianal... [1] https://serc.carleton.edu/serc/cms/prov_reuse.html https://serc.carleton.edu/serc/cms/prov_reuse.html