Taking copyrighted images and dumping them into a machine learning model is deliberate usage. The AI isn't a person, so it doesn't draw on past experience by happenstance.
AI is just a lossy form of storing the copyrighted work and using pieces of the copyrighted work for future output. It definitely requires licensing of the works stored (I mean 'trained on')used if used outside of 'personal use'. I can't just re-compress a tons of pictures into crappy jpg format and then use them however I'd like. I also can't just come up with a new format for machine storing copyrighted images to be used for creating derivative works, call it AI, and say it's 'different'. The AI company has to be able to prove in a court of law it could have generated the image if it hadn't been trained on my copyrighted work. We already covered this area of law with sampling in music. If you didn't want to continue over ownership of the work from the owner of the 'sample' you either license it or.... don't use it.
if it is storing the copyrighted work, then I'm sure you could point which part of the weights corresponds with a specific work, right? Same way that you could do it if we were to "re-compress a tons of pictures into crappy jpg format", or if we were "sampling music". Oh, you can't do it? Then, I'm afraid it's not the same.
Taking copyrighted images and dumping them into a machine learning model is deliberate usage. The AI isn't a person, so it doesn't draw on past experience by happenstance.