Technical and ethical debt in the AI fair use crisis

The widespread use of copyrighted data to train AI systems without permission triggered a prolonged “AI fair use crisis.” This paper explores the legal, policy, technical, and ethical dimensions of this issue through the lens of technical and ethical debt. It defines the crisis, examines how copyright concerns arise throughout the AI development life cycle, and reviews key issues from ongoing legal cases. The analysis concludes with a set of proposed approaches to address the AI fair use crisis.