Courts won't buy this, at least not completely. Copyright infringement liability accrues to the entire value chain - model users and developers alike. So the on

Courts won't buy this, at least not completely. Copyright infringement liability accrues to the entire value chain - model users and developers alike. So the only way for a model to see copyrighted data during training and be non-infringing is if there's no conceivable way to reproduce training data. I don't think fair use saves us either, at least not the model authors, because the whole selling point of these models is to replace artists. Yes, artists can use them as tools, but that is far less lucrative. The valuations and hype being thrown around specifically come from, among other things, being able to cut the creative class out of their own business. No court is going to look at that and say "ok, yeah, sure, it's perfectly fine for you to be using other people's work to train on". An individual using an AI art generator may still wind up getting novel output that isn't obviously infringing to anything in the dataset. If that's the case then they probably haven't infringed copyright. Or at least, it'd be difficult to make a case around it.