Actually if you rewrite it in a different language, you're well on your way to making it an independent expression; (though beware Structure, Sequence and Organization, unless you're implementing an API : See Google v. Oracle). Copyright protects specific expressions, not functionality.
> Compare that to pepople prompting directly with name of artist they want to replicate. This in direct copyright infringement in both essence and intention no matter the resulting image.
As far as I'm aware an artists' style is not something that is protected by law, Copyright protects specific works.
If you did want to protect artistic styles, how would you go about legally defining them?
We will see because we are well on our way of LLMs being able to translate whole codebases to different stack without a hitch. If thats OK than any of the copyleft, open-core or leaked codebases are up for grabs.
When you prompt for Mijazaki image this image can only exist thanks to his protected work being in database (where he doesnt want to be) otherwise the user wouldnt get Mijazaki image they wanted.
We will see how that all plays out but i think if Mijazaki took this to court there would be solid case on grounds that the resulting images breach the copyright of the source, are not original works and are created with bad intent that goes against protections of original author.
What seems to be current direction is atleast that the resulting images cannot be copyrighted automatically in public domain. Making it difficult to use commercially.
If you order an LLM (or a human) to do a straight 1:1 translation, you'll sort of pass one test (it's a completely different language after all!), but fail to show much difference wrt structure, sequence or organization. I'm also not entirely sure how good of an idea it is technically. If you start iterating on it you can probably get much better results anyway. But then you're doing real creative work!
If you've ever worked with open source models (eg one of the stable diffusion models or models based on them, using tools such as AUTOMATIC1111 or ComfyUI); you can inspect them yourself and simply see. If you haven't done so already, see if you can figure out the installation instructions for one of the tools and try!
Meanwhile ...
Ok, fine, I've heard some crazy compression conspiracy theories, but they're a bit too crazy to be credible.
I've also heard stories about these models being intelligent - a little artist living in your computer. I think that's going a bit too far in another direction.
In reality, I think it's better to install the software and take your time to learn about the way these models are actually built and work.
[ btw: If Miyazaki were to take this to court with the argument you put forward, he wouldn't get very far. "Please remove my images from your systems in whatever form you are holding them". The response for the defense would simply be: "We don't actually have them, and you are quite welcome to inspect all our systems". ]
(Incidentally, I've been here before. I play with synths as a hobby! ;-)
What do you mean by "Database" in this context? What information do you think is being stored, (and how?)
Thats why i on purpose tend to call trainng data + model the database. Because to non progammers it makes more sense. To me there is intentional slight of hand of hiding the fact that the only reason LLMs can work as they do now is because of the source data. The way its usually marketed it seems like the model is program that generalised principles of drawing from looking and other drawings thats why it can draw like Mijazaki when it wants to. Not that it can draw Mijazaki because it preprocessed every Mijazaki drawing, stemmed patterns out of it and can mash them with other patterns (from the database).
Thats why i intentionally say database to lead this discussions back to what i see is core of these technologies.