Now I'm not saying that nothing created by these AIs should be considered copyright infringement. As a human artist, you are not judged on your process, you are judged on the end results. The same should be done for the works created by these AIs.
You can make an AI that doesn't memorize a specific training input; similarly you could probably make one that intentionally memorizes them. Both of these seem useful.
In my view it isn't. No one image contributes a significant amount, and the process the machine is doing it analogous to that a human does when the human learns.
We do tend to treat humans differently based on them being sentient beings with a limited lifespan, not machines.
I also feel that the act of producing plagiarized content is unethical, immoral and I'd be supportive of new concepts in intellectual property law that make it illegal too.
(Prompt: "A horse delivering mail in New York City, 1870")
What if you trained the model and only distributed generated images?
Is a human making art "in the style of" also infringement?
1. The LAION group committed possible copyright infringements and even left undeniable evidence that they did - on top of their written testimony (dumping the "stolen goods into the river" does not make the infringement undone, does it?)
2. Any model trained on the "linked" data may commit copyright infringement.
3. As consequence, you using generated images may be liable.
I always wonder how it possibly is legal at all - considering that as a human artist if I was to copy material and remix it it without proper permission would be liable (again depending on situation), but suddenly ML is around the corner and it's all great and now you can keep remixing the potential problematic output further - no questions asked!?
I guess there are no precedence cases but why should an automaton/software (and its creators) be judged differently to persons? I don't want to spoil the fun but what am I missing?
Also disappointed that this dataset did not make sure to only collect unproblematic content like Creative Commons that allows remixing. Would be a hell of a attribution list but definitely better than what is presented here.
EDIT: Formatting
EDIT2: I actually followed one of the projects mentioned not the linked repository. Clarified above.