> Regardless of the lawsuit, this seems like a quite spurious, self-serving argument in and of itself. If the “coordinates” of the image were not equivalent to the image, how would it be possible to fine tune the model on a set of images and recreate their style? This is setting aside the myriad examples where SD regurgitates fairly close copies of individual works.

This argument confuses an image and the style. The former is copyrightable, the latter is not.