I think it's more like authors have not "licensed" people to use their works to make profit from, which is current law. The AI companies just use a 'non-profit' entity to collect the images to skirt around the law, otherwise why would they use a non-profit subsidiary and be very careful about only using non-copyrighted music for music based AI?

I can grind up CDs and use the glittery material to make an outfit that I sell to a fashion collector for a million dollars. Use doesn't matter, transmission of a copyrighted work or something sufficiently derivative is what matters.

The image collection has been primarily performed by Laion, which made up of researchers from various academic institutions. The datasets are very popular in research, and they've enabled a lot of advances in the field.

Copyright law doesn't care about "use". It cares about copying and redistribution. The code at issue here was copied by GitHub and OpenAI for training. A fair use defense is warranted here because if it's successful no license will need to be abided by.