Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

The issue isn't that a generator lets you evade copyright somehow; it doesn't. The output is not the issue. If I sit in paint and my assprint happens to perfectly duplicate a Picasso, that's unlikely to fly in court if I try to sell copies. Picasso painted it first.

The point at issue here is that some people are arguing that the models themselves are like a giant collective copyright infringement, since they are in a vague sense simply a sum of the copyrighted works they were trained on. Those people would like to argue that distributing the models or even making use of them is mass copyright infringement. My thought experiment is a reductio ad absurdum of that reasoning.

It is different from a human brain in that it is not a human brain. It is a statistical function that produces some optimized outputs for some inputs.

I have made no mention of things being authorized in public. In the US you are allowed to take a photo of anything you want in public. These models are not being trained on datasets collected wholly in public though, it is very insidious to suggest that they are.

The internet is not "the public". It is a series of digital properties that define terms for interacting with them. Now, a lot of material is publicly accessible online, but that does not mean that it is not still governed by copyright. For example, my code on Github is publicly accessible, but that doesn't mean you can disregard the license.

If you use this copyrighted material to produce a product for commercial gain you will likely face a fair use test in court. If you use it for a non-commercial cause with public benefit you could probably pass that fair use test. Open source will do very well because of this.

The model is not a human though, and very often these are not "public" works that it is trained on.

AI training has nothing to do with copyright as it currently exists. Someone has access to a boatload of IP (because it was made publicly available) and trained a neural net with it. Now you want to retroactively create restrictions on what the implicit public rights were. Traditionally the implied license was something like you can't republish, redistribute, or use commercially, even though restriction on private redistribution hasn't been possible to enforce since the internet era. Now you want more restrictions.

If someone generates an image that's sufficiently similar to a copyrighted work, and publishes it in a way that violates fair use, you can send a takedown and potentially sue them. How the image was created doesn't matter, any more than it would matter whether Warhol had been able to scan the photo and then manipulate it in photoshop to get that result, instead of artistically copying it by hand. The result is the same. The potential for copyright infringement is the same, because it's the derived work that matters, not the process.

What you're attempting to do instead is the equivalent of trying to regulate scanning because it operates on copyrighted works.

I suspect you understand why you want to regulate AI training rather than regulate its output. I think you know AI is going to flood the market, currently certain types of images and simple music, but soon photorealistic portraits, complex music, and eventually video and even more complex works. Essentially all of those works will be clearly novel, not close to existing human-created works. They won't be copyright violations, so you have to cut this tech off at the knees and feed the blood mouse [1] by retroactively deciding that AI training is a violation of the implied license granted when people make their creations publicly accessible. Those AI creations will destroy most of the market for human-created works, and you can't have that.

I don't think many people, other than rightsholders, desire the IP dystopia your desired policy would create, which is holders of large archives of IP churning out endless AI-generated content (which no doubt they'll want to be able to copyright, contra the copyright office's current guidance), while preventing most competition by others who won't have a sufficient library of the right flavor of IP to train an AI model.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pIVVpoz5zk

GPD is made up of the sum of revenue in a country though. It's not unreasonable to point out the scale in comparison to existing companies.

I could not be more thirsty for some nations to declare certain forms of copyright/ip to be invalid.

IP is by far one of the most virulent, fastest spreading, most persistent & aggressive legalisms. The texts get copy pasted across borders with unbelievable speed.

What doesn't happen is nations making reasonable decisions about what ip doesn't cover. Every nation is coerced quickly into following ip maximist guidelines. The world lacks the ability to see what would happen if we didn't allow endless patents on whatever the frak common sense nonsense, and then another half century beyond that of extenuating patents. The system is broken, and what can be controlled seems to only grow and grow and grow. There's no wins for the public. Ever. This is perhaps the only stake in the ground of the last 50 years, and what a fairly minor point. So sad to see society sold out to such depraved corporate interests, forver & ever. Society needs real representation too.