There’s nothing stopping you from going to youtube, listening to a bunch of hit country songs there, and using that inspiration to write a “hit country song about getting your balls caught in a screen door”. That music was free to access, and your ability to create derivative works is fully protected by copyright law.
So if that’s what the AI is doing, then it would be fully legal if it was a person. The question courts are trying to figure out is if AI should be treated like people when it comes to “learning” and creating derivative works.
I think there are good arguments to both sides of that issue. The big advantage of ruling against AI having those rights is that it means that record labels and other rights holders can get compensation for their content being used. The main disadvantage is that high cost barriers to training material will kill off open-source and small company AI, guaranteeing that generative AI is fully controlled by tech giant companies like Google, Microsoft, and Adobe.
I think the best legal outcome is one that attempts to protect both: companies and individuals below a certain revenue threshold (or other scale metrics) can freely train on the open web, but are required to track what was used for training. As they grow, there will be different tiers where they’re required to start paying for the content their model was trained on. Obviously this solution needs a lot of work before being a viable option, but I think something similar to this is the best way to both have competition in the AI space and make sure people get compensated.