Professional photographer based in Grand Rapids MI. www.ryanheffron.com
It is illegal. As an artist, if another individual or company wants to use my work for their own commercial purposes in any way, even if just to ‘analyze’ (since the analysis is part of their private commercial product), they still need to pay for a license to do so. Otherwise it’s an unauthorized use and theft. Copyright doesn’t even play into it at that point, and would be a separate issue.
It’s baffling to me seeing comments like this as if the ‘AI’ is some natural intelligence just hanging out going around reading books it’s interested in for the hell of it… No. These are software companies illegally using artists works (which we require licensing for commercial use) to develop a commercial, profit generating product. Whatever the potential outputs of the AI are is irrelevant when the sources used to train it were obtained illegally.
Yet what these companies are doing does not constitute ‘fair use’, period, no matter how much you want to argue otherwise.