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This is correct. If a painter uses AI to generate a concept and composition, then does a classical oil painting of it on canvass they can claim right to the image of the oil painting.

It's no different than an artist painting a public park or forest. They can't copyright that location, but they can copyright the painting of that location.

There were similar debates about photographs and copyright. It was decided photographs can be copyrighted even though the camera does most of the work.

Even when you have copyright on something you don't have protection from fair use. Creativity and being transformative are the two biggest things that give a work greater copyright protection from fair use. They at are also what can give you the greatest protection when claiming fair use.

See the Obama hope poster vs the photograph it was based on. It's to bad they came to an settlement on that one. I'd have loved to see the courts decision.

As far as training data that is clearly a question of fair use. There are a ton of lawsuits about this right now so we will start to see how the courts decide things in the coming years.

I think what is clear is some amount of training and the resulting models fall under fair use. There is also some level of training that probably exceeds fair use.

To determine fair use 4 things are considered. https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/

1 Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.

This is going to vary a lot from training model to training model.

Nature of the copyrighted work.

Creative works have more protection. So training on a data set of a broad set of photographs is more likely to be fair use than training on a collection of paintings. Factual information is completly protected.

-> Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.

I think ai training is safe here. Once trained the ai data set usually doesn't contain the copyrighted works or reproduce them.

Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Here is where ai training presumably has the weakest fair use argument.

Courts have to look at all 4 factors and decide on the balance between them. It's going to take years for this to be decided.

Even without ai there are still lots of questions about what is and isn't fair use.

Hmmm. This comment made me realize that these ai images have something in common with collages. If I make a collage, do I have to include all the magazine publishers I used as authors?

Not defending the AI art here. Imo, with image generating models the mechanisms of creation are so far removed from the "artist" prompter that I don't see it any differently than somebody paying an actual artist to paint something with a particular description of what to paint. I guess that could still make them something like a director if they're involved enough? Which is still an artist?

I dunno. I have my opinions on this in a "I know it when I see it" kind of way, but it frustrates me that there isn't an airtight definition of art or artist. All of this is really subjective

Intellectual property as a concept is incompatible with the continued advancement of human knowledge. Before copyright and patenting, we still had trade secrets and sensitive information, and those things cost us insights into metalworking we are still slowly recovering to this day. We still can't figure out how Roman's stumbled upon some of their glass blowing breakthroughs, and we just recently figured out Roman concrete.

Capitalism didn't invent greet, but it's certainly allowed greed to flourish as a core precept of its design.