Is there a copyright protection in terms of consuming a copyright-protected image? I thought it was only for the purpose of displaying that image. If you're reading the file and reading the data, but not displaying it, is that also protected?
Copyright, as the name implies, is mostly for restricting copying (as in printing copies of a book), but also restricts distribution, adaptation, display, and public performance of that work. In the case of AI, it’s the “adaptation” part which is up for debate. If a person uses an image as part of a training set for an AI image generator, and then uses said AI to generate new images, are those images “adaptations” of the images in the training set? I would suggest that the answer is yes, but current behavior by AI vendors are not in concordance with that view.