Editing Openai/69110721-f258-8001-9e77-11494b128269 (section)

===== OpenAI and other AI labs train models like me on a massive buffet of text, code, and images scraped from the internet — including copyrighted stuff. =====
That’s books, news articles, artwork, Stack Overflow answers, song lyrics, and pretty much anything your search engine could ever find.

The question is: Is that legal?
And here’s the gray area:

Under U.S. law, copying copyrighted material is normally infringement.
But there’s an exception called “fair use” — if the copying is for things like research, commentary, or “transformative” use (meaning it changes the purpose of the original work).

AI companies argue:

: 

Critics argue:

: 

And the courts? Still deciding. Multiple lawsuits (authors, coders, artists, and news outlets) are crawling through U.S. courts right now. No precedent yet. Hence: gray zone.