Ai and the problems with copyright

“A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work”.

What is copyright infringement?
“As a general matter, copyright infringement occurs when a copyrighted work is reproduced, distributed, performed, publicly displayed, or made into a derivative work without the permission of the copyright owner.” –US Copyright office

The thing with Ai is that inorder to make the Ai models, you currently need to download the works locally in order to train the model. This is simply copyright infringement as copying is a reproduction without premission.

Downloading to RAM/browser cache doesnt make an infringing copy, because that is what the owner of the work has approved of (if the work isnt stolen and then put up to internet).
Now the licences of the works aren’t usually available, but most artists and owners of the works would agree that they intended the works to be viewed by humans alone, not by bots or software that feeds the works into Ai training. So this means the Ai scrapers aren’t allowed to even view the works according to how the owner has inteded and by every right to make them to be available. Thus Ai scrapers are already breaking the licensing by doing so even if not downloading the work but doing the data extraction in the browser. (Data laundering is the act of having a third party do the downloading / turning the works into a reprhased dataset in the name of non-commercial use, and then having a commercial company use that dataset train the model.)

Fair use?

Not really, the works are in the end used to make a commercial products that affects the market and value of the original works. Data laundering does not change this fact.
So they should be licensed under commercial license.

Commercial licence requirement in this case works similarly to how some Photoshops (Adobe in the pastfor example) had student licenses that did not allow commercial usage of the images created with a student license. If you didn’t pay for the student license you had no access to the software to begin with. So there is no reason why an an image / other work used to create software couldn’t make the same licensing requirements and require payment to be accessed in the first place.

There simply shouldn’t be any moral nor legal grounds to enable profiting from someone elses work in this manner and scale without compensating them.