People often mistake art for a form of labor production. They expect that labor has to have been performed to create value. But that all changed in the early 20th century.
I really feel bad for Dr. Beef, this must really hurt. But according to the twitter thread ( https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 ) they didn't use the pre-trained models. In any case pre-trained models are labor, not end product. They simply trained them from scratch. Possibly on the same input set.
Even if his license was more strict, they still could have just rewritten the same code and it would have escaped the licensing. Should the original GAN paper ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661 ? ) be given artistic credit here ? What is authorship in this context ? There is a whole chain of people furthering things and doing labor and making decisions.
Yet nobody has even mentioned the original artists whose works were used to train the model. Would it be different if they were living artists ?
In what way is a GAN essentially different than photoshop copy and paste of elements ?