That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies?
“Having copied the five billion images—without the consent of the original artists—Stable Diffusion relies on a mathematical process called diffusion to store compressed copies of these training images, which in turn are recombined to derive other images. It is, in short, a 21st-century collage tool.“
“Diffusion is a way for an AI program to figure out how to reconstruct a copy of the training data through denoising. Because this is so, in copyright terms it’s no different from an MP3 or JPEG—a way of storing a compressed copy of certain digital data.”
The examples of training diffusion (eg, reconstructing a picture out of noise) will be core to their argument in court. Certainly during training the goal is to reconstruct original images out of noise. But, do they exist in SD as copies? Idk
In fairness, Diffusion is arguably a very complex entropy coding similar to Arithmetic/Huffman coding.
Given that copyright is protectable even on compressed/encrypted files, it seems fair that the “container of compressed bytes” (in this case the Diffusion model) does “contain” the original images no differently than a compressed folder of images contains the original images.
A lawyer/researcher would likely win this case if they re-create 90%ish of a single input image from the diffusion model with text input.
There's a world of difference that you are just writing off.
Except with computers, they don't need to eat or sleep, converse or attend stand-ups.
And once you're able to draw that one picture, you could probably draw similar ones. Your own style may emerge too.
Just thinking. Copywriters, students, and scribes used to copy stuff verbatim, sometimes just to "learn" it.
The product of that study could be published works, a synthesis of ideas from elsewhere, and so on. We would say it belonged to the executor, though.
So the AI learned, and what it has created belongs to it. Maybe.
Or, once we acknowledge AI can "see" images, precedent opens the way to citizenship (humanship?)