I think this happens a lot with famous images since that image will be in the training set hundreds of times.

Even if deduplication efforts are done, that painting will still be in the background of movie shots etc.

> Left: “Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Johannes Vermeer” by Stable Diffusion Right: Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer

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.

Have you been following the Andy Warhol Prince drawing case?

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...

No hadn't heard of it, I don't follow copyright law extremely closely it tends to make me annoyed. On it's face reading the case summaries and looking at the two pictures, it feels like the act of manually repainting and the color choices should be enough to render it a transformative work. It's one of the fundamental problems with trying to apply copyright to anything other than precise copies, art remixes and recombines all the time, it's fundamental to the process.

It is a clear case of derivative work (see also https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Derivative_works - internal docs, but their explanation of copyright status tends to be well done)