What you mean to say is that the latter is in your opinion unethical in spirit. You're just plain incorrect that it is likely to be "illegal", or more correctly stated, found to be a copyright infringement.

In all likelihood tools like Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT will be found to copying works in fair use.

The primary argument in favor of fair use is the substantial amount of non-infringing uses for tools like Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT (Sony v. Universal). This does not mean that tools like this are not capable of producing works that infringe just that the liability will be on the person choosing how to use the tool and choosing what to do with what the tool produces. By the time this goes to trial there will be entire industries built on significant non-infringing use of large language models that have nothing to do with the scope of the original copyrighted work and this will have a large impact on considerations of fair use!

I think it goes without saying that everything I write is my opinion, and what you write is yours :)

> substantial amount of non-infringing uses

Your uses may or may not be infringing, but you can use something that infringes to create something that does not infringe. The infringement is at least done by OpenAI etc. when creating the tool you use, even if your use of the tool does not infringe.

That’s not how courts have ever interpreted things and this isn’t just my opinion.

One of us is running into a brick wall in this conversation and that brick wall is “has read related case and statutory law”.

What I’ve been doing is pretending we’re having an objective conversation about copyright so logically I’m treating this closer to a mock trial. I’m not actually sure what you’re doing but I would recommend referencing, you know, the extensive evidence you have to support claims of what is or isn’t infringing.

Now here is logically why what you’re saying is incoherent with regards to copyright:

I can train my own Stable Diffusion. So can you. So can everyone! And we can do so in the privacy of our own private properties and without anyone knowing what we’re doing with all of the images coming through our connections to our ISPs.

No one would really know how if anyone was creating images with or without Stable Diffusion. People would need to bring an image that is significant evidence of copyright infringement in order to get a court to issue a warrant to search for Stable Diffusion in a certain premises… but they can’t because the suspected image doesn’t look anything like the plaintiff’s to begin with.