Not illegal where? If you're in Japan here's a fun thing to try:

1. Ask ChatGPT to generate some Ghibli-likes for you.

2. Find a local photo printing store prepared to print and blockmount them for you (this is actually the hardest part - most will politely tell you to piss off).

3. List them on Mercari or Rakuma.

4. Regularly relist them as they're periodically removed for violating local counterfeiting laws.

5. Eventually explain yourself to a judge and maybe go to prison for a year.

Technically you only need to do 1 and some of 2 to be committing a crime in Japan.

I don't see why it would not be illegal. I don't see the difference between downloading or copying a movie for watching on a TV or for training AI, from copyright point of view

I'd say it violated the spirit the law but not the letter.

HOW? - why say such a thing and not _show_ it. show the letter that was not violated and where this spirit lives.

so many people giving their feelings about laws, about 1s and 0s. -_- what is this stack overflow?

Laws are not code, they are subject to interpretation by the judiciary. The spirit of the law is that transformative use is fair use, but at the time those laws were written no one had conceived of generative AI.

It seems very reasonable to me that we as a society might stop and reassess. It is not a foregone conclusion that all the treasure of humanity be handed over to @sama for a tuppence.

willful commercial copyright infringement at scale is a felony

Generating obviously infringing material is, though, even if there are lots of intermediate steps to do so.

What is obviously infringing? If this was the case then why don't they sue OpenAI directly if it's so "obvious".

that remains to be seen

and especially outside of the united states

most countries have no concept of "fair use" whatsoever

Even fan art manga in Japan is a thing so fair use is more widespread than you may think

nice opinion. now base it on laws and regulations that apply to these companies and show whether it is actually legal or not... - this is not a realm of feelings.

But there's a related question of what the law ought to be, regardless of whether or not it's currently illegal, which is where feelings do come in. In the case of a new technology colliding with old laws, this is the most important discussion to have.