there's a great alternative to "not paying/refusing to pay" (but using and stealing stuff anyway) - just, not using other people's stuff. not using stuff that's built on copyright/license violations. not using artwork you don't own, that you don't have rights, licenses, or permissions to use. (yes, simply 'taking something and making a model from it', would be a violation.) one could just not do a shitty thing, and they wouldn't have to jump hoops to find any justification for the shitty thing they did.

they could do a step-by-step art tutorial, and wouldn't have to pay anybody, nor use tools that rely on stolen artwork. but nope.

highly ironic how they made this thing, and promptly showed it off to thousands of people on the internet, immediately invalidating your example

they also promote (just by choosing and mentioning all of these things) those services, like Replicate, that monetize the use of stolen artwork (by selling compute, directly coupled with nn models), and ultimately profit from it (solely, without "giving back to artists whose art they perused" or anything).

they could make art in a way that wouldn't participate in tech art theft racket, but they didn't. and they didn't just participate in it, but promote it and perpetuate it.

Copyright laws evolve together with evolving tech, and it's interesting to think about how they could be refined for this purpose. They're currently very clearly stopping somebody from blatantly selling prints that are copies of another artist's work. Now, you could argue that these models merely look at art that is available for free consumption for humans, and draw inspiration from it, like a human artist would. Just think of the music industry, and how many songs are (legally) similar for the same reason.

Is the solution to prohibit any type of processing of such images, or should it specifically prohibit the calculation of derivatives of the loss function based on those images, or something else entirely?

> yes, simply 'taking something and making a model from it', would be a violation.

is there precedent for this? How are the services you reference operating if it were so clear?

they're operating while ignoring and violating copyrights and licenses, and opening themselves to a possibility of a lawsuit. there's getty v stability so we're gonna find out.