It's AI so I could easily cause semantic differences. Maybe the dwarves will have different skin colors (early Disney is very racist if we're honest. Let's fix that). Little irrelevant (or even relevant) semantic differences. Or, well, that won't happen with I transform, but easy enough to make it happen.
Even identical, obviously one of those 2 works (whichever version) has gone through AI transformation and one has not. So they can't be the same! It's been changed, and AI erases copyright, or that's the theory that has now been applied to give the money to the billionaires and not to the programmers.
It's like asking if a person is the same before and after taking a shower. The actual change in the person is hopefully nothing, or at at best trivial. Is the person the same after the shower or not? How about before the shower and before the next shower? Both answers are philosophically defensible. Cells are famously semi-transparent to water so they'll replace something like half a glass of water molecules from the body with water molecules that came out of the shower. They'll have aged. Maybe they've been divorced by their wife in the meantime. You can say they're very different ... and you can say they're the same. There is no reasonable objective truth here (and the judge would ignore objective truth for money anyway)
So a judge could take either position on this, which is why I call this an excuse. Obviously the intent of not just OpenAI but of the entire field of ML is to not have any differences. Making it identical is not just what OpenAI did in this case, but that is their very purpose from the moment they were created over 10 years ago. They have never done anything but copy, in the mathematical sense. For a little while they were simply better at it than anyone else. The intent of OpenAI is to not have any differences between ChatGPT output and the output of the programmers that sued them. So you see? Different or not? BOTH options are philosophically defensible, and perfectly consistent. In fact a German court has judged the opposite! [1].
The only VERY large difference between the two viewpoints? Who gets the money ... Three guesses if it was the billionaire that violated copyright (since OpenAI has admitted to illegally downloading training material I think that's fair to say) or the programmers whose copyrights were violated.
Besides, saying 2 works are identical because the bytes are identical is the mathematical definition of identical. It's the very first axiom, generally referred to as the "reflexive property". It says that, for mathematical purposes, a 3 made of concrete and a 3 made of candy are the same thing, because it doesn't differ in essential properties.
But the point is: courts are absolutely famous for ignoring mathematical reality. Like in this case. The whole purpose of the entire field of ML is "universal approximation", which can be very accurately described as making 2 things the same. The whole point of making something like ChatGPT or Claude is that the outputs would NOT be different, for mathematical purposes, from the output of these programmers. And the judge ignored the entire field to make this judgement. The judge ignored one meaning of identical in favor of another, just happens to be the one to give all the money to billionaires.
As you point out, obviously the judge will do the exact opposite reasoning to protect billionaires as well. They will protect Disney against these programmers making an AI Disney movie, based on their real movies. We both know this to be true 99.999%. Hence "excuse". And exactness won't matter. If I make 50 AI slop versions (all of which are different) of all movies in existence, and create a Netflix showing them, we all know that the judge will judge against me in the first 5 minutes to protect huge companies.
The only question that remains is what happens when the inevitable comes, and an AI company billionaire produces an obvious duplicate of a movie [2].
So how do I get the courts to make philosophically defensible choices where I get the money? Clearly the judge decided that this mathematically identical output of these programmers does not mean they hold copyright. And as you agree, an AI changed disney movie the judge will make the opposite judgement to protect Disney's billions. Well, how do I get the judge to take the exact same position on Disney movies, to throw Disney under the bus and protect me and give me money instead? I'll make the Netflix everyone wants with it. So how do I get the judge to have my back instead of some billionaire's back?
How about if I make some very AI-styled semantic changes in the movies? EXACT same look and story, but I switch the characters from Snow White and Bambi while keeping the stories exactly the same. It would be "very AI slop" in style, don't you agree? Would that help?
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20251111-german-court-...
[2] https://variety.com/2026/film/news/elon-musks-grok-ai-genera...