[dragonwriter]

> You (the general you, an amalgam of the AI art defenders I’ve seen) claim the right to create these unauthorized derivative works via an automated process with zero reliance on novel human authorship

If they are created “via an automated process with zero reliance on novel human authorship” they, ipso facto, are not “derivative works”, which are original creations of human authorship subject to separate copyright (which, nonetheless, require permission from the copyright holder of the original work to legally create unless an exception to copyright protection, like fair use, applies.)

What you probably want to argue is that they are unauthorized mechanical copies, not unauthorized derivative works.

Of course, if they are unauthorized mechanical copies, it is probably usually a partial copy of the training set, which if it has a copyright it is a compilation copyright owned by whoever assembled the training set, not of any particular work within the training set. Now, whether the training set is an unauthorized derivative work when compiled is another question.

[caconym_]

> What you probably want to argue

I don't really want to argue either because I'm not a lawyer and from a lay perspective AI works don't seem to fit neatly into either category. It's obvious to me that infringement occurs in spirit, which is effectively what i'm arguing; beyond that I really couldn't speculate on the details of how a successful case to that effect would be built, or how new law would be written.