Comment by hparadiz
9 hours ago
There's way too much hand waving on this topic. It is legal to produce copywritten work. If I draw Pikachu the drawing is mine. Legally. I am simply unable to make money on it. I can give it away if I want with zero liability. I could even hang the drawing up in my restaurant as a decoration. No big deal. What I can't do is use that drawing as my mascot or branding. We have an entirely separate process to determine if you are infringing on a copyright / trademark by using it to sell something. That's why whether or not an LLM can produce a picture of Pikachu is largely irrelevant. It's what you do with it that matters. Even more interestingly if I draw a picture of Pikachu and then the Pokemon Company decides they wanna use that specific picture they actually would have to pay ME for the copyright to use it.
Let's not mix copyright and trademark in mixed phrases like "infringing on a copyright / trademark". The two are very different concepts with different goals.
The main question in the "AI image generator generates a Pikachu image" is whether the AI company serving that image generator to you is violating the copyright or not. Because they make money when doing so (API / subscription cost), and so it's like selling images of Pikachu. The user is likely in the clear as long as they don't go on sell that Pikachu further. But the AI company sold the Pikachu image to the user.
That question is irrelevant. Artists may be hired to reproduce copywritten work without the consent of the copyright owner. In this case an LLM is no different from Photoshop. It is a tool. Nothing more.