Do machines have a right to fair use?

Machines do not have rights or obligations. They cannot be held liable to pay damages or be sentenced for crimes. They cannot commit copyright infringement. But I don’t think we’ll see “the machine did it” as a defense in court.

are works that AI generates is truly transformative?

Usually they are original and not transformative.

Transformative implies that there is some infringement going on. Say, you make a cartoon with the recent Mickey Mouse. But instead of making the same kind of cartoon as Disney would, you use MM to criticize the policies of the Disney corporation (like South Park did). That transforms the work.

Sometimes AI spits out verbatim copies of training data. That is usually transformative. A couple pages of Harry Potter turn into a technical malfunction.

I hope you’ll answer a question in return:

Software created by a for-profit privately held company is inherently created to consume data with the explicit purpose of generating monetary value. If that is the specific intent and design then all contributors should be compensated.

Why? What’s the ethical/moral justification for this?

I know how anarcho-capitalists, so-called libertarians, and other such ideologies see it, but perhaps you have a different take. These groups are also not necessarily on board with the whole intellectual property concept. So that’s what I am curious about. Full disclosure: I am absolutely not on board with that kind of thinking and am unlikely to be convinced. But I am genuinely interested in learning more.