A Master's Student's Dilemma: Who Does Patreon Protect by Blocking AI Crawlers?

In 2024, the global AI training data market is projected to reach $2.5 billion, yet the source of every single data point could spark controversy. Just yesterday, Patreon announced a partnership with Cloudflare to completely ban AI training crawlers while retaining search engine crawling permissions. This news made me—a fresh graduate currently grinding through problems to prepare for AI algorithm interviews—suddenly pause. Where does the training data for the models I tune parameters on every day actually come from? Is it really legal?