Training an AI is orthogonal to copyright since the process of training doesn’t involve distribution.
You can train an AI with whatever TF you want without anyone’s consent. That’s perfectly legal fair use. It’s no different than if you copy a song from your PC to your phone.
Copyright really only comes into play when someone uses an AI to distribute a derivative of someone’s copyrighted work. Even then, it’s really the end user that is even capable of doing such a thing by uploading the output of the AI somewhere.
That’s assuming you own the media in the first place. Often AI is trained with large amounts of data downloaded illegally.
So, yes, it’s fair use to train on information you have or have rights to. It’s not fair use to illegally obtain new data. Even more, to renting that data often means you also distribute it.
For personal use, I don’t have an issue with it anyway, but legally it’s not allowed.
Incorrect. No court has ruled in favor of any plaintiff bringing a copyright infringement claim against an AI LLM. Here’s a breakdown of the current court cases and their rulings:
In both cases, the courts have ruled that training an LLM with copyrighted works is highly transformative and thus, fair use.
The plaintiffs in one case couldn’t even come up with a single iota of evidence of copyright infringement (from the output of the LLM). This—IMHO—is the single most important takeaway from the case: Because the only thing that really mattered was the point where the LLMs generate output. That is, the point of distribution.
Until an LLM is actually outputting something, copyright doesn’t even come into play. Therefore, the act of training an LLM is just like I said: A “Not Applicable” situation.
Most of the big cases are in the early stages. Let’s see what the Disney one does.
There is also the question, not just of copyright or fair use, but legally obtaining the data. Facebook torrented terabytes of data and claimed they did not share it. I don’t know that that’s enough to claim innocence. It hasn’t been for individuals.
The question is whether they are actually transformative. Just being different is not enough. I can’t use Disney IP to make my new movie, for instance.
Training an AI is orthogonal to copyright since the process of training doesn’t involve distribution.
You can train an AI with whatever TF you want without anyone’s consent. That’s perfectly legal fair use. It’s no different than if you copy a song from your PC to your phone.
Copyright really only comes into play when someone uses an AI to distribute a derivative of someone’s copyrighted work. Even then, it’s really the end user that is even capable of doing such a thing by uploading the output of the AI somewhere.
That’s assuming you own the media in the first place. Often AI is trained with large amounts of data downloaded illegally.
So, yes, it’s fair use to train on information you have or have rights to. It’s not fair use to illegally obtain new data. Even more, to renting that data often means you also distribute it.
For personal use, I don’t have an issue with it anyway, but legally it’s not allowed.
Incorrect. No court has ruled in favor of any plaintiff bringing a copyright infringement claim against an AI LLM. Here’s a breakdown of the current court cases and their rulings:
https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/07/fair-use-and-ai-training
In both cases, the courts have ruled that training an LLM with copyrighted works is highly transformative and thus, fair use.
The plaintiffs in one case couldn’t even come up with a single iota of evidence of copyright infringement (from the output of the LLM). This—IMHO—is the single most important takeaway from the case: Because the only thing that really mattered was the point where the LLMs generate output. That is, the point of distribution.
Until an LLM is actually outputting something, copyright doesn’t even come into play. Therefore, the act of training an LLM is just like I said: A “Not Applicable” situation.
While that’s interesting info and links, I don’t think that’s true.
https://share.google/opT62A4cIvKp6pwhI This case with Thomson has, but is expected to be overturned.
Most of the big cases are in the early stages. Let’s see what the Disney one does.
There is also the question, not just of copyright or fair use, but legally obtaining the data. Facebook torrented terabytes of data and claimed they did not share it. I don’t know that that’s enough to claim innocence. It hasn’t been for individuals.
The question is whether they are actually transformative. Just being different is not enough. I can’t use Disney IP to make my new movie, for instance.