People here, as always, get hung up on legalese bullshit, but miss the overall picture.
The dynamics in play is highly questionable. Countless artists and photographers put effort into creating their works. They put they work online to get some attention and recognition. A company comes along, scrapes all of it and starts selling access to the model to generate something that looks highly derivative. The original cohort of artists and photographers not only get zero money or attention from this new endeavor, they are now in competition with the resulting model.
In short, someone whose work was essential to building a thing gets no benefits and possibly even gets (financially) harmed by that thing. Just because this gets verbally labeled "fair use" doesn't make it fair.
Additional point:
Just a few years ago a bunch of tech companies were talking about "data dignity". Somehow, magically, this (marketing) term is no longer used anywhere.
I'm concerned that, and predict that, we will continue to see legal efforts from large data companies to prevent their own data from being used to train similar models. They can use our data, but we can't use theirs. Time will tell.
I also fear our governments are incapable of acting on behalf of the people (non-corporations) in this matter.
The law fundamentally needs to evolve. Latent embeddings of large corpuses of copyrighted works is something we are going to have to wrangle with more directly, it’s not clear to me how we even ought to want it to work in terms of the rights of the copyright holders for data it was trained on.
With the release of spectral diffusion, arguably the genie is out of the bottle now, so there’s probably a ceiling on how much the law can evolve to claw back any retroactively determined rights to copyright holders.
The dynamics in play is highly questionable. Countless artists and photographers put effort into creating their works. They put they work online to get some attention and recognition. A company comes along, scrapes all of it and starts selling access to the model to generate something that looks highly derivative. The original cohort of artists and photographers not only get zero money or attention from this new endeavor, they are now in competition with the resulting model.
In short, someone whose work was essential to building a thing gets no benefits and possibly even gets (financially) harmed by that thing. Just because this gets verbally labeled "fair use" doesn't make it fair.
Additional point:
Just a few years ago a bunch of tech companies were talking about "data dignity". Somehow, magically, this (marketing) term is no longer used anywhere.