[contrast]

The law tends to be weighted towards the consumer, but the law does apply to producers and supply chains, too. Photoshop doesn’t come with a library of copyrighted images, and would not be able to do so without licensing those images (whether they were explicitly labelled or not). Ditto any other tool.

If people had to pay for the AI equivalent of that image library (ie the costs of training the model), I doubt many would. It’s phenomenally expensive. Costs for a creative tool and a copy of whatever IP you personally want to play with are negligible by comparison.

It’s never been the case before that a toolmaker could ship their tools with copyrighted materials because they’ve no control over the end product. The answer doesn’t change whether they charge or not, and there no reason why AI should change that either.

People tend to “feel like it’s a bit more of a gray area” when there is cool free stuff at stake, and I’m no exception. It would be a more convincing question if it was “what if we had to pay our fair share of the costs involved?”, rather than “what if we could just have it all at no charge?”.

[strix_varius]

Exactly - AI and "free" (scraped) training data aren't inseparable. Any of the big players could train a model exclusively on content they own. Photoshop is a good case in point here - that's what Adobe has done, since they own a huge stock photography library.

But that would unveil the truth of the current situation: early AI adopters, myself included, are benefitting from an obfuscated form of theft. If OpenAI had to compensate the contributors to their training set, I wouldn't get such generous access for $20/month.