If I can take copyrighted images and feed them into an AI, why can’t I take any code I find online and ignore the license terms and feed it into a compiler? How do you justify the existence of something like the GPL?
Is it ok to scan copyrighted works. I think Google Books' win at the Supreme Court shows that yes it is.
Is it ok to process them down to the rawest information?
Is it ok for people to generate content from the raw information (and ok for them to charge for it)?
The last two I don't have an answer for, but I understand the fear of artists and the anger that their hard work is being shovelled into the monster that is going affect their work. But also more broadly the make-up industry, the lighting industry, studio spaces, lens makers, paint manufacturers, etc etc etc.
a compiler is not transformative. You translating a book into another language doesn't make it a new work.
But an AI that takes billions of images, and uses it to synthesize something different and new, is fairly transformative under my eyes, and deserves new copyright. Unless the AI generated image is largely composed of a small number of works, i don't see why anyone should have copyright ownership of such an output!
if anything I would argue that human taking code from multiple places and making it compile into something more useful is much more synthetiz-ing than AI...