[aabajian]

IANAL. Is it legal to create derivatives of copyright work and then post them on public online forums? For example, I can certainly write, "Mickey Mouse got food poisoning from his Big Mac." But, if I ask an AI generator to "Make a picture of Mickey Mouse getting food poison at McDonald's", could I post the resulting picture?

[archontes]

I am also not a lawyer; I have some background and training in IP law as it pertains to engineering.

As far as I can tell, the image you describe and your example sentence are closer than you might think to each other. Mickey Mouse is a copyrighted character, and Disney could certainly claim infringement for both. Whether you have a fair use claim is down to the tenets of fair use, and whether they sue you is down to their estimation of how likely it is it'd be profitable for them to do so.

So what is fair use? https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107

Put simply, you have to argue about it in court and decide on a case by case basis, but the factors are:

The nature of use, such as for profit vs. non-profit.

The nature of the copyrighted work. Your art might be considere literary criticism. How central to that message is Mickey Mouse?

The amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work appearing in your work. Mickey Mouse is the sole feature, so large.

How likely is it that your Mickey Mouse creation will serve as a substitute for people consuming normal Mickey Mouse content?

[gpm]

Aren't some versions of Mickey Mouse out of copyright now...

[nineteen999]

Steamboat Willie.

[radley]

The context is generating images based explicitly on intellectual property. The problem is that most AI image generators allow IP as terms and/or they consumed IP to build their model, so they will return IP-based artworks.

If you're a business using the image and used IP terms in your prompt, then you'd need permissions from both parties (Disney, McDonald's) before you post it. If you're writing about AI rights, or making a comment on social media, then less likely you'll need it.

If your prompt was a cartoon mouse gets food poison at a fast food joint, you're off the hook. But if it returns Mickey Mouse at McDonalds, then the AI generator is still on the hook for using IP as a source.

At least, that's where this is all going.

[Workaccount2]

>At least, that's where this is all going.

Not really, because that would still be a loss for artists. Where they are trying to steer the ship is to "training on IP is copyright violation".

Artists are looking to stop AI from taking their jobs. An AI generator with an IP filter on it's output will still very much be a threat to their work.

[archontes]

I agree that interested parties are trying to steer the ship there. I just don't see the legal arguments that will get them there.

Given the fact that images are transmitted to a person in a manner that doesn't violate copyright (and even if they are, the transmitter, not receiver is guilty of infringement), training an AI is not something that copyright law limits.

The AI weights that result are about the farthest thing from a derivative work, as the weights as a separate object, don't seem to contain the slightest remnant of the original work.