“Did they have a right to use publicly posted images” is up for the courts to decide

Pretty sure that’s already decided. Publicly played movies and music are not available to be used. Why would the same not apply to posted images?

What court case set the president that you can’t train a neural network on publicly posted movies and audio?

I'd assume the precedent would be about sharing encoder data, which would be covered in bittorrent cases.

"Training a neural network" is an implementation detail. These companies accessed millions of copyrighted works, encoded them such that the copyright was unenforcable, then sell the output of that transformation.

Not being able to reproduce the inputs (each image is contributing single bytes to the neural network) is relevant. Torrent files are a means to exactly reproduce their inputs. Diffusion models are trained to not reproduce their inputs, nor do they have the means to.

If you post a song on your website and I listen to it am I violating your copyright?

If my parrot recites your song after hearing my alleged infringement, I record its performance and post it on YouTube is that infringement?

Last one, if I use the song from your website to train an song recognition AI is that infringement?

If I host a song I don't have license to on my website I'm violating copyright by distributing it to you when you listen on my site.

If my parrot recites your song after hearing it and I record that and upload to YouTube. I've violated your copyright.

If a big company does the same(runs the song through a non-human process, then sells the output) I believe they're blatantly infringing copyright.

Big Company is not distributing the input images by distributing the neural network. There is no way to extract even a single input image out of a diffusion model.

I should have specified the OP has legal rights to the song and the end user listening was under the same granted/implied license as a program doing the web harvesting, my bad.

"right" in the informal sense or in some legal sense?

Legal

Can you clarify? My understanding is that it's very unclear whether there are any legal issues (in most jurisdictions) in scraping for training.

Obviously some fairy reputable organisations and individuals are moderately confident that there isn't otherwise they wouldn't have done it.

"It's very unclear" in legal cases is synonymous with "it hasn't been challenged in court yet". You say they're moderately confident because they're fairly reputable, but remember that Madoff was a "reputable business man" for the 20 years he ran a ponzi scheme. They don't have to be confident in the legality to do it, they just had to be confident in the potential profit. With openai being values at $10B by Microsoft, I'd say they've successfully muddied the legal waters long enough to cash out.

That's one company. There's dozens if not hundreds of companies, research groups and individuals working under the same assumption.

Maybe it's a mass delusion but that feels like a stretch.

If I make it sound like a sinister conspiracy or cash grab, that's because that's what it as long as it's a private entity and not a public endeavor.

I don't deny that this might be a worthy pursuit or the right direction to be looking, or that that's the reason some people are in it. I just question the motivations of a private company valued at $10b which is going to have a lot more control over the direction of the industry than those passionate individuals.