I would think that generating those images is okay by Disney, the same as if I painted them. The moment Disney would object is when I start selling them on merch, at which point it is irrelevant how they were created.
Am I mistaken?
On the other hand, nobody owns a copyright on a specific style. If I go study how to make art in the style of my favorite artist, that artist has no standing to sue me for making art in their style. So why would they have standing to sue for art generated by an AI which is capable of making art in their style?
[1] https://fishstewip.com/mickey-mouse-copyright-expires-at-the...
It's very confusing, especially when you have to consider trademark as related but separate.
The punishment for breaking any of these rules is a lot of people yell at you on Twitter. Unfortunately, they've been at it so long that they now think these are actual laws of the universe, although of course they have pretty much nothing to do with the actual copyright law.
That actual law doesn't care if you're selling it or not either, at least not as a bright line test.
(Japanese fanartists have a lot more rules, like they won't produce fan merch of a series if there is official merch that's the same kind of object, or they'll only sell fan comics once on a specific weekend, and the really legally iffy ones have text in the back telling you to burn after reading or at least not resell it. Some more popular series like Touhou have explicit copyright grants for making fanart as long as you follow a few rules. Western fanartists don't read or respect any of these rules.)
Copying an artist's style isn't in and of itself looked down upon, any artist will tell you that doing so is an important part of figuring out what aspects of it one likes for their own style. The problem with AI copying it is that the way the vast majority of users are using it isn't in artistic expression. The majority of them are simply spamming images out in an attempt to gain a popularity "high" from social media, without regard for any of the features of typical creative pursuits (an enjoyment of the process, an appreciation for other's effort, a desire to express something through their creativity, having some unique intentional and unintentional identifying features).
Honestly maybe the West messed up having such broad fair use protections since it seems people really have no respect for any creative effort, judging by all the AI art spam and all the shortsighted people acting smug about it despite the questions around it being pretty important to have a serious conversation about, especially for pro-AI folk.
The AI art issue has several difficult problems that we are seemingly too immature to deal with, it makes it clear how screwed we'd be as a society if anything approaching true AGI happened to be stumbled upon anytime soon.
In the former case, I'd agree.
In the second, there's a clear violation of 17 USC 506(a)(1)(A).
That is based on the fallacy that derivative creativity is somehow lesser than so-called “original” creativity.
The vast majority of AI art I've seen on sites like Pixiv has been 'generic' to the level of the 'artist' being completely indistinguishable from any other AI-using 'artist'. There has been very little of the sort where the AI seemed to truly just be a tool and there was enough uniqueness to the result that it was easy to guess who the creator was. The former is definitely less creative than the latter.