I think this is a great question, but I think answers should rest on a slightly more detailed understanding of how actually copyright works. IANAL, but to a fi

I think this is a great question, but I think answers should rest on a slightly more detailed understanding of how actually copyright works. IANAL, but to a first-order approximation: everything is "copyrighted" [1]. The copyright is owned by someone/something. The owner gets to set the terms of the licensing. The rare things not under copyright may have been put explicitly into the public domain (which actually takes some effort), or have had their copyright expire (which takes quite a while; thanks Disney). So: this is really a question about fair use [2], and about when the terms of licensing kick in, and it should be understood and discussed as such. I don't think anyone who has really thought about this is claiming that the models can't be trained on (copyrighted) material; the consumption of the material is not the problem, is it? The problem is that the models: (1) sometimes recreate particular inputs or identifiable parts of them (like the Getty watermark), or recreate some essential characteristics of their inputs (like possibly trademark-able stylistic elements), AND ALSO, (2) have no way of attributing the output to the input. Without being able to identify anything specific about the input, it is impossible know with certainty that the output falls within fair use (e.g. because it was sufficiently transformative), and it is impossible to know how to implement the terms of licensing for things that don't fall within fair use. There's just no getting around that with the current crop of models. The legal minefield is not from (1) or (2), but from (1)+(2), at the moment of redistribution, monetized or not. Even if Copilot was only trained on non-reciprocal licenses (BSD, MIT), there are very likely still licensing terms of use, which may include identifying the original copyright owner. Reciprocal licenses like GPL have more involved licensing terms, but that is not the problem: the problem is failure to identify the original licensing terms. We should not use these models as an opportunity to make an issue about GPL or its authors, or about the business model of companies like Getty; both rest on copyright, and come to our attention because of licensing. Sorry about the rant. As for your question: I think it may be as simple as: to what extent are readers here the producers of inputs to the ML models, versus consumers of outputs. It gets personal for coders when models violate licensing terms of FOSS code, but it feels fun/empowering to wield the models to make images that we'd otherwise be unable to access. From my rant above you can tell that whether its for code or images, I think the whole thing is an IP disaster. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use