It's not a legal way to "launder" copyrighted images, because for things where copyright law grants exclusive rights to the authors, they need the author's permission, and having permission from someone and plausible deniability is not a defense against copyright violation - the only thing that it can change is when damages are assessed, then successfully arguing that it's not intentional can ensure that they have to pay ordinary damages, not punitive triple amount.
However, as others note, all the actions of the major IT companies indicate that their legal departments feel safe in assuming that training a ML model is not a derivative work of the training data, they are willing to defend that stance in court, and expect to win.
Like, if their lawyers wouldn't be sure, they'd definitely advise the management not to do it (explicitly, in writing, to cover their arses), and if executives want to take on large risks despite such legal warning, they'd do that only after getting confirmation from board and shareholders (explicitly, in writing, to avoid major personal liability), and for publicly traded companies the shareholders equals the public, so they'd all be writing about these legal risks in all caps in every public company report to shareholders.
> However, as others note, all the actions of the major IT companies indicate that their legal departments feel safe in assuming that training a ML model is not a derivative work of the training data, they are willing to defend that stance in court, and expect to win.
I think the move will be to argue fair use, declaring the derivative work to be transformative, and possibly to point out that only a small amount (1%-3%) of the original data is retained.
However, as others note, all the actions of the major IT companies indicate that their legal departments feel safe in assuming that training a ML model is not a derivative work of the training data, they are willing to defend that stance in court, and expect to win.
Like, if their lawyers wouldn't be sure, they'd definitely advise the management not to do it (explicitly, in writing, to cover their arses), and if executives want to take on large risks despite such legal warning, they'd do that only after getting confirmation from board and shareholders (explicitly, in writing, to avoid major personal liability), and for publicly traded companies the shareholders equals the public, so they'd all be writing about these legal risks in all caps in every public company report to shareholders.