Even if the person can't claim the copyright of the image produced they ARE responsible for the use of their tools and what they do with the output.
In this case, they released an image with someone else's signature on it. That is wrong, the person should take the blame for that.
The person releasing the image may take it up with the AI service that their tooling led them into making such a mistake. But good luck with that in court...
Somebody “made something.” But just because you do something doesn’t mean you get to claim whole ownership of it and get to sign it with your name. Plenty of examples in life.
LLM generated picture with artists signature. That's no problem.
Person takes this picture and proceeds to share it around is the problem.
What annoys me is when "LLM hacks website!". Uh, it just went and did that completely unprompted? Nope.
Somebody ran it on a computer somewhere, gave the LLM some kind of prompt+access combination - however precise or vague - and THEN the LLM did a thing.
Power tools are well known for making human bits go missing. But nobody says "The angle grinder did it on it's own! Nobody is at fault!"
Maybe the person wasn't trained. Maybe it's the wrong tool for the job. Maybe the manufacturer of the tool is at fault for selling a product without appropriate safety guards. But the LLMs aren't doing self sustaining thinking for themselves just yet.
It’s funny I talk about this a lot. I haven’t quite worked out my metaphor, but it feels kind of akin to somebody writing a poem for the first time or drafting a short story. They drink a bunch of coffee, hammer it out through the middle of the night, then blast it out to the world expecting praise and adoration (whether they’ve written before or not). But then they get upset when people say it’s not complete or it looks rushed. Indignant even.
Despite how quickly LLMs turn out things and how little effort you can put in to get something out of them, people seem to have this weird cognitive dissonance about it. They feel like you are attacking them and then passionately defend their tools. But they didn’t really put that much effort in, so why are they bothered when you treat it that way?