> My point is that producing an AI image “in the style of a photograph” is less of an infringement on artists’ rights than producing an AI image “in the style of Pablo Picasso”. Surely you can agree with me on that point?

It depends entirely on what image was produced. The prompt isn’t the infringement, the output is. And photographs are no less copyrightable than any other art. So I can’t agree with your statement as written because the statement doesn’t make sense and is not true. If an AI’s output happens to look like one or two specific photos, then it violates copyright, regardless of what the prompt was. (The photo doesn’t even have to be in the training set!)

You might have gotten stuck or confused on the idea of whether or not users actually prompt for a specific artist or art style. I stopped talking about a prompt to copy a named artist several comments ago and started pointing out that AI inference can break copyright without a prompt to break copyright.

So, If you’re trying to give a hypothetical example of AI producing an image that looks like a photograph, but not one that looks like any existing photograph, then I can agree that this inference doesn’t violate copyright. But if the output does end up looking like an existing photograph for any reason, then it does violate copyright. This doesn’t depend on whether we’re talking photography or drawings, the standard is the same regardless of the medium. The balance of photos in the training set might change the likelihood of accidentally reproducing one of them, and that’s an interesting question, but not what we’ve been discussing.

> I'm not splitting hairs on whether an image is imitating "style of <artist1>" or imitating "style of <artist1> and <artist2>". A distinction like that is not meaningful. If you imitate artist1 and artist2 in the same image, that's still imitation of specific artist styles.

Good. You’re getting closer to what I’ve been trying to say. AI always imitates the style of some number of specific artists, because it is always trained on some number of specific artists, and it usually inferences from fewer than all the artists in the training set. The number might be high for any given run, and a particular style might not always be identifiable, but the design of the system is, in fact, to copy from multiple artists at all times. I agree with you that the distinction between one and many is not that meaningful, however in the courts there is precedent for declaring a copy of one artist to be a violation of the law while letting a remix of several artists off the hook. From the copyright perspective, AI inference might not violate copyrights as long as there is no identifiable infringement of a singular work.

Whether or not training on copyrighted materials in the first place infringes has not yet been litigated, but since humans get threatened and sued for it all the time, there’s reason to believe AI could have legal trouble in it’s future unless they manage to get ahead of it and change the law, which is exactly what OpenAI recognized and started trying to do.

Hopefully this is obvious to you, but following people on Civitai doesn’t prove anything about how often people try to prompt for specific artists, and given the growing exposure to copyright issues surrounding this, it’s entirely possible that the people using prompts that intend to break copyright are choosing not posting their output. You have absolutely no idea how many people are prompting for specific situations or styles or names. And again, the “majority” usage is completely irrelevant to this discussion.