With all due respect, the lawyers I've seen who commented on the issue do not agree with your assessment.
The things that constitute potentially infringing copying are not clearly well-defined, and whether or not training an AI is on that list has of course not yet been considered by a court. But you can make cogent arguments either way, and I would not be prepared to bet on either outcome. Keep in mind also that, legally, copying data from disk to RAM is considered potentially infringing, which should give you a sense of the sort of banana-pants setup that copyright can entail.
That said, if training is potentially infringing on copyright, it now seems pretty clear that a fair use defense is going to fail. The recent Warhol decision rather destroys any hope that it might be considered "transformative", while the fact that the AI companies are now licensing content for training use is a concession that the fourth and usually most important factor (market impact) weighs against fair use.
Lawyers commenting on this publicly will add their bias to reinforce the stances of their clientele. Thus somebody usually representing the copyright holders will say it is likely infringing and someone usually representing the AI companies will say it is unlikely.
But you are right, we don't know until president is set by a court. I am only warning people that laying back and hoping that copyright will apply as they wish is not a good strategy to defend your work. One should consider alternative legal constructs or simply not releasing material to the general public anymore.
The things that constitute potentially infringing copying are not clearly well-defined, and whether or not training an AI is on that list has of course not yet been considered by a court. But you can make cogent arguments either way, and I would not be prepared to bet on either outcome. Keep in mind also that, legally, copying data from disk to RAM is considered potentially infringing, which should give you a sense of the sort of banana-pants setup that copyright can entail.
That said, if training is potentially infringing on copyright, it now seems pretty clear that a fair use defense is going to fail. The recent Warhol decision rather destroys any hope that it might be considered "transformative", while the fact that the AI companies are now licensing content for training use is a concession that the fourth and usually most important factor (market impact) weighs against fair use.