[luma]

Google scrapes copyrighted material every day and then presents that material to users in the form of excerpts, images, and entire book pages. This has been ruled OK by the courts. Scraping copyrighted information is not illegal or we couldn't have search engines.

[kg]

Google is not presently selling "we trained an AI on people's art without permission, and you can type their name in along with a prompt to generate a knockoff of their art, and we charge you money for this". So it's not really a 1:1 comparison, since there are companies selling the thing I described right now.

[luma]

That pretty clearly would fall under transformative work. It is not illegal for a human to paint a painting in the style of, say, Banksy, and then sell the resulting painting.

[kg]

Humans and AI are not the same thing, legally or physically. The law does not currently grant AI rights of any kind.

[luma]

If a human isn't violating the law when doing that thing, then how is the machine violating the law when it cannot even hold copyright itself?

[estebank]

In some locales sitting on the street writing down a list of people coming and going is legal, but leaving a camera pointed at the street isn't. Legislation like that makes a distinction between an action by a person (which has bounds on scalability) and mechanized actions (that do not).

[kg]

I'm not sure how to explain this any clearer: Humans and machines are legally distinct. Machines don't have the rights that humans have.

[Ukv]

Fair Use is the relevant protection and is not specific to manual creation. Traditional algorithms (e.g: the snippets, caching, and thumbnailing done by search engines) are already covered by it.

[ufocia]

What's not prohibited is allowed, at least in the US.

[ufocia]

Scraping is only legal if it's temporary and transformational. If Google started selling the scrapped images it would be a different story.

[Kuinox]

What is not transformational for generative AI ?