Just a few says ago there was a thread where artists recreated Disney art with A.I. I simply cannot imagine a world, where this stance will stand. Sooner or later we will see a massive crackdown by the large copyright holders.
A key litmus test: can an AI produce output that can substitute for a copyrighted work, to the extent that the commercial value of that copyrighted work is diminished? e.g. if a future hypothetical DALL-E-for-video can diffuse a mkv file containing something that plays very much like Star Wars, then surely possessing the model would be treated as possessing a copy of the movie.
Curious how such a crackdown would even be enforced. Stable Diffusion is allowing artists to opt-out, so I guess that's a start?
The whole idea that the copyright holder needs to opt-out is seriously broken. Copyright is not 'opt-out'. Stable diffusion has set themselves up for trouble, this should have been opt-in.
What if a marketing team generates 100 candidate characters with AI for the next feature film, selects the best one and then writes an incredibly detailed brief for a human artist to reverse engineer the character. Could you then copyright the human generated art?
The current copyright is quite clear on this already, imho. Tools don't matter, what matters is how similar the output is to the original.