- Addenda -

For the interested parties, the law states the following [0].

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

    1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
    2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
    3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
    4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

So, if you say that these factors can be flexed depending on the defendant, and can be just waved away to protect the wealthy, then it becomes something else, but given these factors, and how damaging this "fair use" is, I can certainly say that training AI models with copyrighted corpus is not fair use in any way.

Of course at the end of the day, IANAL & IANAJ. However, my moral compass directly bars use of copyrighted corpus in publicly accessible, for profit models which undermine many people of their livelihoods.

From my perspective, people can whitewash AI training as they see fit to sleep sound at night, but this doesn't change anything from my PoV.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors