Literally if you asked someone for a recognizable outline of the strongest gemstone's iconic cut you'd get the outline and the rest is an obvious path. Humans might unconsciously, or even by choice, avoid something too similar to something they already know.
Superman's costume also uses vibrant colors. The red / blue pairing is used extensively across many logos and visual representations for the high contrast of two vibrant colors.
As I try to imagine an older child or young adult somehow raised in an environment like pop culture but through some twist absolutely unexposed to Superman or any related concepts, it isn't that far of a stretch to imagine independent invention of a strikingly similar idea. Maybe not as a first draft but in exploring a range of possible powers and automatic logos. E.G. as in the range of an LLM backed character creator for a superhero game, and then aneling the results though simulated effectiveness / fitness of hero powers, logo design, etc.
Everyone wants to think they're a special snowflake and that what they create is somehow unique as well. However we're all drawing on a huge pool of common culture to synthesize expressions which fulfill a set of constraints prescribed by the culture and the culture's influence on the individual and the moment being experienced.
In the case of Superman that's even arguably a description of the archetype. They are literally a super man. Clark Kent however, that's a little more unique and probably a Trade Mark (consumer commercial use protection) as long as such a registration is maintained.
If a we have ai-powered content generation in a video game, and you put into a prompt, "generate 300 mickey mouses, then play some music that sounds like Taylor Swift's new album", and the results look exactly like mickey mouse and the music is Taylor Swift's, it's really difficult to argue that's not copyright infringement.
Yet, people get away with thinking that's not copyright infringement because "the algorithm learned it, like a real human". If the prompt just created a human-designed model, then that is copyright infringement.
The solution might be big corporations create an adversarial network that you can train against to purge copyrighted works from your network.
You wont find a copy of a plaintext in a cyphertext. But you can still extract the plaintext from the cyphertext.
I think a better counter example is mpeg and other lossy formats. But again, the format does nothing but carry the original even if it’s not a perfect reproduction. You can’t use it in any other way. Its expressed intent is the reproduction of the copyrighted material with no modification or improvement or derivation. These models are not trained with the intent or purpose of only producing the copyrighted materials. It requires your specific action to induce the reproductions if it’s even possible, but it generally serves other purposes in all other uses.
This is more like a xerox than not - you can certainly violate copyright with a xerox. But the existence of the xerox itself isn’t to violate copyright. It’s for other purposes. The ambiguity obviously comes in that a xerox machine wasn’t built by scanning all documents on earth first. But I think the very act of mixing all the other images and documents together into the model, which again, is just a statistical aggregate of everything that was trained with mushed together, turns it into at worst a derived work that falls under fair use.
If you ask a VFX artist to create the "Superman Logo" with Photoshop they'll do an excellent job.
The first one isn't copyright violation because it is fair use. The second maybe if it is redistributed but we don't ban the use of photoshop by artists because they can choose to reproduce copyright things with it.
"It must have a copy" - but van Gogh didn't make paintings of hot rods or whatever, and you can't copyright style or technique.
I mean, I've literally gotten the Superman logo in Stable Diffusion without even trying, so it isn't that lossy.