Not even counting watching something that was torrented. Or watched in the wrong country via a VPN. Or a Meme that doesn't pay the original photographer.

The majority of what AI's consume is from publicly available web pages. Putting a "license" requirement on reading those is problematic.

If I watch a movie and it shows an artwork in the background of a scene is that licensed (there are been lawsuits along these lines)? If I hear music being played loudly by someone else is that licensed?

What exactly am I licensed to do with a magazine I find by the side of the road? Or a random webpage I just read?

Lots of edge cases. Copyright Law made a lot more sense when they only people creating and publishing content were a few companies. Not the entire population

So, while some edge cases may technically exist, I wouldn’t call them meaningful in any way whatsoever.

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/who-owns-memes

But if what you have asserted is true then me reading anything that I casually come across on the Internet is okay then it is okay for a web-crawler to do the same and feed that data to an AI.

I am saying this is probably the same for humans using the Internet. They don't have an explicit license to read or learn from much of what they read on the Internet.

You are asserting that most of the edge cases are fair use or similar.

The problem is that OP is asserting that an explicit license is required for an AI to learn from content.

My main point is that it is a contradiction to believe that it is legal for humans to read and learn from anything and illegal for machines to do they same. Either it is legal or illegal for both.

> Generally, posting and sharing memes online as a form of expression is not actionable and is usually protected under the First Amendment and the doctrines of fair use.

Fair use is a defense to all possible claims of copyright infringement, not just the violation of the exclusive right to create derivative works.