Genuine question about image generation: If someone uses a generative AI tool to produce an image that is substantially similar to a copyrighted piece (a drawing, painting, movie screenshot, etc), who should be liable for copyright infringement? Should it be: A. the company producing the tool? B. the (human) creator of the piece? C. the person or entity posting/publishing the piece? D. the communication platform through which the piece is distributed? 1. Copyright law protects against unauthorized exact or near-exact copies of a painting, photo, movie, or other visual piece. 2. When a person distributes a sufficiently similar copy of an art piece, it's a violation of copyright regardless of the tools and process used to produce it. 3. The liable person is the person *distributing* the piece, not the artist, and not makers of the tools. 4. Image generation systems are trained to generate images that are on the "manifold" of nice-looking images. Obviously, the training images are on this manifold. 5. Hence, sufficiently detailed prompt will produce images that are substantially similar to images from the training set. It is not at all surprising that a prompt like "The Batman movie, rooftop scene, screenshot, 4k..." will produce an image very similar to an actual screenshot from the movie. 6. Whether using publicly available-yet-copyrighted screenshots and other materials as part of the training set constitutes a violation of copyright is a separate question. As far as I can tell, this question is not legally settled in the US.