Sure, but there have been many copyright cases about plagiarism (in writing and in music). It's rarely cut and dry. There's a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism, which can only seemingly be settled in court. That approach is not feasible when dealing with the amount of data (and copyright holders) that Google gobbles up.
Using AI is probably the most inefficient way to obtain copyrighted content. It's much faster to simply find the original image or text and copy that instead.
The fact that we call the curve fitting/optimization/compression that we do to fit machine learning models to input data "learning" is really unfortunate and leads to this kind of conflation.
If we trace the path of how we ended up here, it's similar to how people incorrectly refer to loci of DNA as genes. We have behavior analysis where we speak of learning as the conditioning via the antecedant-behavior-consequence loop. There was the Hebbian theory of how the ABC loop manifested physically in neurons. Early neural net papers took inspiration from that that mechanism and called it learning.
Meanwhile, actual learning is far, far richer than the Hebbian theory of synaptic strengthening, and has a lot more going on than just operant conditioning.
So, please, it's time for everyone to stop pretending that the fact that ML inherited the word "learn" as a term of art for curve fitting has any philosophical weight.
Putting aside the fact that what we call AI today is not learning in the same way as humans. They operate on a VASTLY different scale compared to humans. On a good week I can read a book. A single book. A massively parallelised data centre can do that billions or trillions of times faster. Scale of effect (lacking a better phrase) must be considered.
There have always been legal differences between a human doing something and technology doing the "same" thing.
It's legal for me to go to a nude beach and stare at a topless woman. It's probably legal for me to draw a picture of that topless woman and distribute it. It's definitely not legal for me to take pictures of that topless woman with my phone and post them on the internet.
It's legal for me to overhear a conversation you and your friend are having on a bus. It's legal for me to transcribe what I heard and post it online. In most jurisdictions, it's not legal for me to record that conversation.
Ingesting data for use in machine learning models is still too new to have any specific legislation around it. But the argument that the technology is just doing a thing that humans do has zero relevance.
>It's definitely not legal for me to take pictures of that topless woman with my phone and post them on the internet.
This is legal. You can take pictures of anyone, nude or not in a public setting and post them anywhere.
>It's legal for me to transcribe what I heard and post it online.
This is murky. It's legal to take notes of what you've heard but that comes with all the pitfalls of hearsay. Legally, it's not treated as the human equivalent of recording because humans have no such equivalent.
The first one is iffy.... probably depends on a country too. If you take a panoramic shot of the beach, and someone is randomly topless.. sure. If you take a telephoto lens and single them out, it's questionable, and in many countries, illegal. Same as with walking vs following someone, even in public... the intent is different, so is the legality.
