The training data question is a licensing question

Debates about training data tend to collapse into questions of technical possibility. The harder question is contractual: what was licensed, to whom, and for what use.

Consent was never granular

Most web content was published under terms that did not anticipate bulk machine ingestion. That is not the same as permission, and it is not the same as prohibition either.

Where this settles

Collective licensing, opt-out registries and per-publisher deals are all being tried at once. None of them yet covers the long tail of individual creators, which is where most of the data came from.