Yes you would owe them money.
This why I'm against artists trying to chokehold the AI.
Case in point, this bot was clearly trained on David Attenborough samples, perhaps it can't be used commercially without purchasing some rights to the man's likeness.
How folks can think it's reasonable to impersonate Morgan Freeman and use his voice to sell, for example, crypto crap. It's gross and should absolutely be illegal.
Whenever the topic of copying material for model training purposes arises on hn, however, a number of folks seem convinced such use falls under the rubric of “transformative” and will be considered fair use.
It’s hard to see how mixing (copying!) a bunch of books into a computer algorithm to produce (commercially!) content that might itself easily be incorporated into a book in the same market could possibly be fair use.
No, its a right of publicity/right of personality issue, not a copyright issue. While that's not a federal law issue in the US, its an issue in some US jurisdictions, and its a national law issue in a number of non-US jurisdictions.
The mistake is thinking “would not owe money under the current copyright regime” means “would not owe money”: there are more laws in the world than just copyright law.