I know. AI is capable of recreating many ideas it sees in the training data even if it doesn’t recreate the exact images. For example, if you ask for Mario, you get Mario. Even if you can’t use these images of Mario without committing copyright infringement, AI companies are allowed to sell you access to the AI and those images, thereby monetizing them. What I am saying is that if AI companies can do that, we should be allowed to use our own depictions of Mario that aren’t AI generated however we want.
AI companies can sell you Mario pics, but you can’t make a Mario fan game without hearing from Nintendo’s lawyers. I think you should be allowed to.