Wanting to encourage investment in AI in the 1980s, Parliament created a category of “computer-generated works” in section 9(3) of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA). These are works which are generated by a computer in circumstances where there is no human author. The author is therefore deemed to be the person “by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.” To date [Dec 2019], there has been no case law to answer the question of whether there is any requirement of originality for computer-generated works under section 9(3).
The UK has also permitted text data mining - if you can legally access it, you can make a model based on it; the licensor cannot carve out an exception for this purpose. It'd be logical, though not automatic, that this approach might be applied to images as well
In the UK, however, copyright is assigned to whoever arranged for the work to be created by a program:
There have been consultations on changing this, but as it stands ‘computer-generated work’ is protected for 50 years from the date on which it was made - shorter than the normal 70 years, but still essentially the same form of protection. The owner is the arranger, or their employer, not the AI.
The UK has also permitted text data mining - if you can legally access it, you can make a model based on it; the licensor cannot carve out an exception for this purpose. It'd be logical, though not automatic, that this approach might be applied to images as well