Both hypotheticals are likely infringement. The first example may be considered de minimus, but the courts hate using those words, so they might just argue that

Both hypotheticals are likely infringement. The first example may be considered de minimus, but the courts hate using those words, so they might just argue that you didn't blur it enough to be unrecognizable or that it could be unblurred. However, the thing that makes AI training different is that: 1. In the US, it was ruled that scraping an entire corpus of books for the purpose of providing a search index of them is fair use (see Authors Guild v. Google). The logic in that suit would be quite similar to a defense of ML training. 2. In the EU, ML training on copyrighted material is explicitly legal as per the latest EU copyright directive. Note that neither of these apply to the use of works generated by an AI. If I get GitHub Copilot to regurgitate GPL code, I haven't magically laundered copyrighted source code. I've just copied the GPL code - I had access to it through the AI and the thing I put out is substantially similar to the original. This is likely the reason why Getty Images is worried about AI-generated art, because we don't have adequate controls against training data regurgitation and people might be using it as a way to (insufficiently) launder copyright.