Left: “Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Johannes Vermeer” by Stable Diffusion Right: Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer
This specific one is not copyright violation as it is old enough for copyright to expire. But the same may happen with other images.
from https://alexanderwales.com/the-ai-art-apocalypse/ and https://alexanderwales.com/addendum-to-the-ai-art-apocalypse...
Even if deduplication efforts are done, that painting will still be in the background of movie shots etc.
Even that if done by a person as far as I understand it would not constitute a copyright infringement. It's a separate work mimicking Vermeer's original. The closest real world equivalent I can think of is probably the Obama Hope case by AP vs Shepard Fairy but that settled out of court so we don't really know what the status of that kind of reproduction is legally. On top of that though the SD image isn't just a recoloring with some additions like Fairy's was so it's not quite as close to the original as that case is.
It is current at the SCOTUS so we should see a ruling for the USA sometime in the next year or so.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol_Foundation_for_t...
If you “trace” another artists work the hammer comes down though. For Copilot it’s way easier to get it to obviously trace.
"Copying" a style is not a derivative work:
> Why isn't style protected by copyright? Well for one thing, there's some case law telling us it isn't. In Steinberg v. Columbia Pictures, the court stated that style is merely one ingredient of expression and for there to be infringement, there has to be substantial similarity between the original work and the new, purportedly infringing, work. In Dave Grossman Designs v. Bortin, the court said that:
> "The law of copyright is clear that only specific expressions of an idea may be copyrighted, that other parties may copy that idea, but that other parties may not copy that specific expression of the idea or portions thereof. For example, Picasso may be entitled to a copyright on his portrait of three women painted in his Cubist motif. Any artist, however, may paint a picture of any subject in the Cubist motif, including a portrait of three women, and not violate Picasso's copyright so long as the second artist does not substantially copy Picasso's specific expression of his idea."
https://www.thelegalartist.com/blog/you-cant-copyright-style