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.
