>Training a human neural network is analogous to training an artificial neural network.

By definition, something analogous is similar but not the same. Lots of things are analogous to others, but that doesn't even remotely imply that they should be governed by the same laws and morality.

>An AI consuming a copyright work is no different to a human consuming a copyright work.

A human consuming food is no different to a dog consuming food. Yet we have vastly different laws governing human food compared to dog food. Dogs and AI are not humans, and that is the difference.

>If that work is provided for free consumption, why would the owner of the AI have to pay for the AI to consume it?

If that work is provided for free consumption, why would the owner of a building have to compensate the copyright owner to print a large high quality copy and hang it on a public wall in the lobby? The answer is that the person (not the AI) is deriving some benefit (beyond fair use) from their use of the copyrighted work, and therefore the copyright owner should be compensated.

>Corporations don’t pay licensing when an employee gets inspired by a movie they saw last night.

The employee themselves paid to view the movie. The copyright owner set the amount of compensation knowing that the employee could retain and use the knowledge gained. No more compensation is due. This is nothing like a person or corporate entity using unlicensed copyright works to train an AI.

>Why do you keep mentioning corporations? An AI could just as easily be trained by an individual. I’ve written and trained a few myself.

Me too. I keep saying "person or corporation training an AI" to remind us that the law (and any moral judgement) applies to the person or corporate entity conducting the training, not to the AI per se, because the AI is merely a tool and is without agency of its own.

Yes, humans experience copyright works and learn from them, and that's fair use. What does that have to do with training an AI?

A person or corporation training an AI is covered by normal copyright law, which requires a license to use the work.

No, because (as I mentioned earlier) there is a fair use exemption which allows humans to be educated using copyright works. However, there is no such exemption allowing corporations to train AI using copyright works.

AIs don't have agency. The AI is a tool which is being operated by a corporate entity. The corporate entity is governed by existing laws, and requires a license to use a copyright work in the operation of their business.

People making copyright work available on the internet are granting an implied permission for search engines to index their work, because that's pursuant to the normal purposes of posting on the internet. People make work available on the internet for the purpose of allowing others to find it using search engines and view it using browsers.

However, making copyright work available on the internet does not constitute an implied permission or license to do literally anything with the posted work. People don't usually post work on the internet for the purpose of helping corporations train commercial AIs, and therefore no implied permission to do so is granted by the act of making copyright work available on the internet.

I don't believe that an artificial neural network is morally or legally equivalent to a human. If I did believe that, then there would be more pressing issues than copyright infringement to deal with, such as corporate enslavement of AIs.

Human artists learning from others' work is obviously "fair use." I don't think a corporation will successfully deploy that in defense of training a commercial AI.

In a shocking twist, posting data on social media constitutes implied permission for other users to process it in their browsers in order to read it .

However, in a second shocking twist, posting doesn't constitute implied permission for corporations to train AI with the contents of posts.

Are monetized AI artists paying royalties to everyone whose art was scraped off the web?

Slaughterbots

The CIA really did have an LSD fuelled brothel/dungeon and it really was called Operation Midnight Climax.

If I was the CIA, I've give it a super secret code name so nobody would ever guess what's going on. Maybe... Operation Midnight Climax!