@gvwilson
This is hilarious, but also kind of silly. If I make a drawing of Mikey Mouse with Photoshop, will Disney sue Adobe?
Copyright in ai-generated images is not different from any other image.
Now the actual copyright issue, I think, is about the images than went into the model and the model itself. That a company can take copyrighted content and then sell a product based on them.
There's lots of fascinating law in this area. :) Is training a model on an image a protected use of that image, in any given jurisdiction? There's probably little or no case law on the subject (in the US at least), and the wording of the statutes isn't that helpful.
I think the companies making the AI art tools may be subject to two possible kinds of claims that don't apply to photoshop: that the tools were made using an impermissible use of the works, and that the tools make it too easy to impermissibly reproduce the works. I don't think either kind of claim is obviously good OR obviously bad; it's all new territory...
I doubt there's a simple answer in any of this. :) At least in the US, the consensus of actual #copyright lawyers seems to be that this whole area is a mess and there's no telling what any court might find!
I would SPECULATE that if an image was used (only) as parody, then it would fall under the parody rules, regardless of how it was created. But who knows!
