Can I feed copyright protected material into a generative AI tool?

Copyright protected material cannot in principle be fed into a generative AI tool without permission of the copyright holder. As an individual, it is necessary to obtain a licence. However, an exception for ‘text and data mining’ by machine reading was included in the EU Digital Single Market (Copyright Directive) of 2019 and translated into Irish law in 2020, with the important proviso that any copyright holder can opt out of the exception.