In the US, exceptions to copyright come across in two distinct bundles: first sale and fair use. They exist specifically because of the intersection between cop

In the US, exceptions to copyright come across in two distinct bundles: first sale and fair use. They exist specifically because of the intersection between copyright law and two other principles of the US constitution: - First sale: The Takings Clause prohibits government theft of private property without compensation. Because copyright owners are using a government-granted monopoly to enforce their rights, we have to bound those rights to avoid copyright owners being able to just come and take copies of books or music you've lawfully purchased. - Fair use: The 1st Amendment prohibits government prohibitions on free speech. Because copyright owners are using a government-granted monopoly to enforce their rights, we have to bound those rights to avoid copyright owners being able to censor you. If you hinge your argument on "I bought a copy", you're making a first sale argument. Notably, first sale is limited to acts that do not create copies. This limit was established by the ReDigi case[0]. Copyright doesn't care about the total number of copies in circulation, it cares about the right to create more. So an AI training defense based on first sale grounds would fail because training unequivocally creates copies. Fair use, on the contrary, does not care if you bought a copy of a work legally. It only cares about balancing your right to speech against the owners' right to a monopoly over theirs. And it has so far been far more resistant to creative industry attempts to limit exceptions to copyright - to the point where I would argue that "fair use" is an effective shorthand for any exception to copyright, including ones in countries that have no fair use doctrine and do not respect judicial precedent. The courts won't care how the training comes about, just if the act of training an AI alone[1] would compete with licensing the images used in the training set data. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_LLC_v._ReDigi_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_LLC_v._ReDigi.... [1] Notably, this is separate from the act of using the AI to generate new artistic works, which may be infringing