An artist « uses » licensed content all the time, just to learn. If we start taxing the learning process (not the teacher, but the learning material itself), then we’re in trouble.

And it’s going to be even worse with multimodal ai and robotics : imagine a robot walking in the streets, looking at cars, and ads, and people, then generate original content based on what it saw on the street (much like a human do). Who’s going to collect for all the licensed content it was exposed to ?

That's the idea - content used for training ais should be licensed. Also there is nothing intelligent about current ai, there is no learning involved, just software ingesting content, there's nothing original about what ai generates. It really shouldn't be compared to humans. Just because a laptop can emit sound it doesn't mean it can sing. Neither can a piece of software aimed at mimicking human brains think or learn.

But then you'd make a distinction in the license based not on the usage (learning), but on the recipient. A human listening to a song and "learn" composition => fine. A machine doing the same => not fine.

That's going to be totally impossible to apply. Imagine a sound processing software than "learned" mixing based on a collection of popular records, and provide you, the composer, with presets => wrong, copyright.

Ok, now imagine an ai that learned how to configure a sound processing software based on records. It only outputs numbers and presets for the software. => wrong, copyright.

Now, imagine an ai that learned those settings, by asking hundreds of human what they like in some kind of A/B testing. The humans will judge based on the songs they've heard in their lives, and the end-result (the settings) will basically be the same as in the previous example. But somehow, this will be fine.

Honestly, i don't see how this can fly.