One precedent is that it's not unusual for artists to practice by going to art galleries and sketching or drawing the art on display. It's a standard art student assignment. If that's not a copyright violation, an LLM doing something similar isn't.
How is the LLM case similar at all? As soon as the student’s use of the museum piece crosses into the commercial realm (eg pay the student to draw it for you), I expect you to have legal trouble.
"Transformative nature" is just one of several factors that go into deciding if something is fair use. Also, fair use is decided case by case in the courts, so one can't say that "training LLMs on copyrighted materials is fair use".
Model vendors know this isn't fair use, given that they're self-censoring the training and/or generation of copyrighted materials by entities big enough to hurt them. As usual, the rest of us have no recourse other than bend over and take it.
One precedent is that it's not unusual for artists to practice by going to art galleries and sketching or drawing the art on display. It's a standard art student assignment. If that's not a copyright violation, an LLM doing something similar isn't.
Why? An LLM isn’t a human. Why should the same rules apply to it?
Model vendors know this isn't fair use, given that they're self-censoring the training and/or generation of copyrighted materials by entities big enough to hurt them. As usual, the rest of us have no recourse other than bend over and take it.