“Fair use” is, technically, not actually permitted by copyright law. ISTR that “fair use” is only a defense you can use when you are being sued for copyright violation.
Suppose we create a new AI image generator, and use as training input every image ever made of a Disney character (official images by Disney, that is, no fan art), including every frame of every Disney movie. Could we just use the output images of that AI however we wanted to? (Not withstanding trademarks.)
Looks like there is case law that fictional characters are protected if they are "sufficiently delineated." I don't see how that applies to code, though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fic...
This is a novel scenario. It seems unclear how the courts will interpret it? Never mind what we think, will they decide it's a derivative work, or is it a transformative use?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use