I don’t think any but the most copyleft segment of society thinks it would be reasonable for a generative AI trained on exactly one persons work to be used for profit by someone else.
An AI trained on two or ten people’s work probably feels the same for most folks, but what about when it’s thousands or millions? What if instead of one persons work it is the works held in copyright by an entity like Getty Images?
Why do you think that? It doesn't seem obvious to me at all.
So I think the key part is "used for profit".
Wasn't suggesting it is. The point is that the tool is used to create things that substitute for the original authors' work by ingesting the works of those authors. The impact of the copying matters when weighing fair use.
If I use your copyrighted works to supplant you in some way, even as a part of a large group, then it's unlikely to be deemed fair use.
Meanwhile, drawing Mickey ears on the wall of a kindergarten is not safe.
If you feel strongly that generational ML somehow launders copyright out of the bits, train an image generator purely on Disney copyrighted material and share the model on the web, see how well that works out.
Second, the way we've seen generative AI be used is not really the same as it was touted originally, that a mere prompt could replace an entire artist's work. A year later, we see that most people, artists included, don't use it as a verbatim text to image machine, they use it as a tool. See apps like ComfyUI or others which allow Node based or layer based image creation and editing, which even Photoshop now has. It's the same as Copilot and ChatGPT, it's not replacing any programmers, just increasing their productivity Given that, it is not looking like generative AI is hurting one's professions, quite the opposite.