It is not illegal for a human to look at something another human created and learn composition, strokes, lighting, etc... and then apply it to their own future creations. This is all the AI is doing.
Taking copyrighted images and dumping them into a machine learning model is deliberate usage. The AI isn't a person, so it doesn't draw on past experience by happenstance.
AI is just a lossy form of storing the copyrighted work and using pieces of the copyrighted work for future output. It definitely requires licensing of the works stored (I mean 'trained on')used if used outside of 'personal use'. I can't just re-compress a tons of pictures into crappy jpg format and then use them however I'd like. I also can't just come up with a new format for machine storing copyrighted images to be used for creating derivative works, call it AI, and say it's 'different'. The AI company has to be able to prove in a court of law it could have generated the image if it hadn't been trained on my copyrighted work. We already covered this area of law with sampling in music. If you didn't want to continue over ownership of the work from the owner of the 'sample' you either license it or.... don't use it.
if it is storing the copyrighted work, then I'm sure you could point which part of the weights corresponds with a specific work, right? Same way that you could do it if we were to "re-compress a tons of pictures into crappy jpg format", or if we were "sampling music". Oh, you can't do it? Then, I'm afraid it's not the same.
It's hugely different - imagine the number of decisions a person makes when making an oil-painting - each stroke is somewhat influenced by past experience but also by the current state of the painting, their emotional state etc. The AI is just directly interpolating based on past input.
Making the two processes equivalent is very reductive.
The AI is a product created by a company. A vacuum sucking up the scraped remnants of the internet. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to pull this off. Stop acting like this is a human or anything resembling one. This is a product and not a person.
Yes, it can be illegal. It happens plenty of time in music, where artists produce songs which are too similar to previously existing songs, and owe damages.
