[batmenace]

I would argue that there is a difference to the 'inspiration' you mention. As I see it, what SD does with Getty's database is more akin to me as an artist taking the Getty pictures and making a collage from the photos (actively using them).

[There is a separate point around the value of the Getty database. Routinely, companies are sold with their customer list / database as a main selling point. Getty has undoubtable value through the sheer size of collected work. Nobody could expect that we just assign 'no' value to it, even if it can be accessed (with a watermark) for free by most.]

[Auracle]

What SD does is nothing like a collage, though. It's not picking and choosing from images that it has stored and mixing them. If you tell it to make a human dog, it's not picking one image of a human and one of a dog and cutting them up and pasting them back together. It'll take the concept of what makes a human and a concept of what makes a dog and put those together. That's a pretty big difference.

[sinuhe69]

You can prove your point by manually make a collage and see if you can get a similar result, which I highly doubt.

[nradov]

Under US law it is totally legal for artists to make collages out of copyrighted works. But in order to sell a collage it has to be sufficiently transformative. There is some case law to help determine that threshold.