[hansvm]

Of course it matters. If I put the right data into a paintbrush and canvas I'll reproduce copyrighted works too. Nobody is confusing the model for a Picasso anymore than they confuse a paintbrush for a painting. The law may rule differently for one reason or another, but these are obviously different categories of things.

The reason a jpeg is copyright infringement has more to do with its express purpose being to allow the user to view that copyrighted work. If it were bundled in a program that just allowed you to view the color histogram of famous works (and the author had the right to view those photos and didn't think it important to save bandwidth by precomputing those histograms) it likely wouldn't be infringement. If it were found out that people were downloading that program just to rip the bundled images out then the author might get in hot water anyway. Your distributed file example is similarly probably infringing.

The model has other capabilities, and I think it would be hard to argue that its purpose is copyright infringement (which is separate from what you seem to be doing, which is arguing that the model itself is infringement -- both a little easier and harder to argue because it pushes more on philosophical distinctions than statements of fact about how people are using a thing).

Separately, there are new classes of concerns these models introduce. We don't have to abuse copyright law to take the time to consider those effects. E.g., should voice cloning be allowed and to what degree? It's already illegal in a lot of contexts (fraud, ...), but we don't currently have many rights when it comes to our innate physical characteristics. To the extent those rights exist, you often have to waive them for basic services (e.g., a nontrivial fraction of leases and jobs stipulate that you give a permanent, <much other legal jargon>, license for them to use your image for nearly any purpose, including falsely characterizing your approval of the property in advertisements and marketing materials -- unless covered under libel/slander and a couple other carveouts they're probably not punishable). Can studios just refuse to hire voice actors for more than one session? Is that good for society? Can I clone passers-by on the street to play in my commercial? These are new enough capabilities (at least at their current scale) that they're not very well legislated, and I wouldn't be surprised if we saw an expansion of something like "moral rights" to cover them.