I think this is basically the same as the sentiment that there is no such thing as a truly novel idea.

The standard isn’t “I think that looks like an Andy Warhol picture”, it is “That is substantially similar to a specific Andy Warhol piece”. Copyright doesn’t protect style.

> Feature extraction is literally a form of lossy compression.

This is one way think of neural nets, another is that they find the topological space of pictures.

But these are just models of computation, which aren’t especially relevant in the same way that it isn’t relevant what produces an infringing image, just that it is produced.

Which brings me back to my original point: there are a two different barriers for generative ai: is the model itself transformative, and is the primary purpose of the model to generate copyright infringing material.

With respect to the first… I have no idea how someone could argue that the model itself isn’t transformative enough. It isn’t “substantially similar” to any of the works that it is trained on. It might be able to generate things that are “substantially similar”, but the model itself isn’t… it’s just a bunch of numbers and code.

Regarding the second: I have less experience with image models, but I use chatgpt regularly without even trying to violate copyright, and I don’t think I’m alone, so I doubt you could make an argument that llms have a primary purpose of committing copyright infringement.