Stack Exchange has announced that it will introduce as a preview a new form of a question asking assistance:
Through an updated semantic search experience, after a user searches or asks a question in the Stack Overflow search bar, we can leverage AI to provide a results summary that draws from multiple high-quality answers on Stack Overflow, in addition to providing the traditional search results list of questions and answers.
A screenshot added shows a heading saying "Search results", followed by a summarizing text that is, as I understand it, produced by an Artificial Intelligence agent. Below that follows a list of links, with a header "Sources", that list the answers used to produce the summary.
It is is relatively clear the list is covered under fair use. But what about that summarizing text? To produce it, the whole content of all listed answers needs to be processed, making it adapted material. Would this form of processing considered to be "fair use"?
Note this is different from using large databases (in this case, the whole of the SO content) to train the AI. The already-trained AI processes a relatively small number of answers (maybe up to 50) to give a summary of their content.
The practical difference this would make lies in the fact that answers on the Stack Exchange network are licensed by its authors by a CC-BY-SA license. While the attribution requirement is obviously fulfilled by the listing of the sources, the question remains if the share-alike clause needs to be respected. Must the result summary text be licensed also under a CC-BY-SA license?
This Q&A does give a general overview how to determine fair use, but does not give an answer how to apply the tests (especially no. 3, substantiality) to the above case.