Well, for one, no “theft” occurred at all. There is a reason it is called “infringement”. This is like saying that our brains are “stealing” the art we look at.
Second, absolutely. Even if someone wanted to call it theft, the only theft occurred by the user, not the LLM. This is like saying photoshop is stealing because you can use it to recreate copyrighted images. Or, again, like saying when a user looks at a painting then paints something similar, they are “infringing”. What a silly, silly thing.
Beyond that, this cites Reuters v Ross Inteligence as a precious “win” against AI, but that case had literally nothing to do with AI. It was a straight direct infringement case. It’s the difference between “we had an LLM read the law and create notes”, and “we had the LLM rephrase the copyrighted notes directly so we could try to avoid licensing them”. That activity would be infringing with or without the LLM participation.
Even funnier is that none of the circled items are actually infringing. Right off the top, none of the positions line up with the original image, and none of the items match the original image. In fact, if anyone looks closer, the entire image is different and just shares similarities (likely prompted) with the original. The fire is different, the shadows are different, the persons pants, shirt, hair, mask are different. Literally nothing is the same other than the overall composition…which isn’t protectable.
Are they seriously trying to argue that any image that contains a street sign, tail light, and green blob, and looks similar to another image is, is therefore “infringement”? How many people have taken exactly the same photo of the Eiffel Tower from the same location? Did they all infringe on each other because they have similar features and compositions?
What nonsense.