I’m also now mildly disturbed/worried by the idea of going about my business in AI-generated VR a few years from now (maybe with some 2D-to-3D-ifying compatibility layer) and being haunted by ghosts of stock image watermarks.

I noticed the same thing. I'm not surprised about the current discussion over copyright because this training data pretty clearly has a basis in unlicensed Shutterstock images.

> A lot of those examples have a Shutterstock watermark. I doubt that Shutterstock allows the use of unlicensed videos for this use case.

That almost everyone (other than, maybe, people specifically and very loudly selling the fact that they aren’t, e.g., Adobe) training base AI models is relying on the idea that doing so is fair use and doesn’t require a license is hardly news.

If they posted these videos on publicly accessible websites, it could be fair use. We need some more court cases to really know.