Just because something is publicly accessible on the web that does not mean it is in the public domain and free of copyright or other restrictions on use. Big M

Just because something is publicly accessible on the web that does not mean it is in the public domain and free of copyright or other restrictions on use. Big Media - and many smaller players - have been fighting this battle for decades but generally winning because the law is relatively clear in this area in most places. There is absolutely nothing in the law in my country - or probably most countries other than possibly the US - that says you can grab whatever you like if you can find it online and do whatever you want with it. And in the US the potential loophole is fair use and that has been controversial for a long time since it's clearly in violation of the global copyright treaties to which the US is also a signatory so something as big as AI might be enough to get other countries to push back significantly where usually they turn a blind eye. So if OpenAI is doing that then I don't see how they are not in breach of copyright in much of the world. I would experience considerable Schadenfreude if that resulted in epic scale lawsuits because I don't think the use of "training AI models" as a means of laundering copyright infringement is a positive step. Like the search engines that started including significant parts of the original content directly on their results pages it's a distortion where the people who actually do the creative work are not the people being rewarded for it.