[PhotonHunter]

Is it possible that the primary liability for OpenAI is trade dress? If you can produce things in (for example) the style of a Studio Ghibli film, such that an ordinary consumer can’t tell if the source is Studio Ghibli or AI, is that actionable? I feel like I see copyright concerns all the time with AI but rarely is trademark discussed.

[episteme]

Can a style be trademarked? I thought that was what copyright was meant to cover.

[Kye]

(not a lawyer) This is the exact opposite of how it works, at least in the US.

Copyright: covers works on publication. Registering it allows for seeking of statutory damages.

Trademark: covers defining characteristics. This can be muddy since defining characteristics are not necessarily the same as style.

It can be especially confusing when certain things become characteristic of a genre. This is mostly what transformer and diffusion models cover: the strongest weights will be what's most common in the training data. You get a lot of em dashes and heroes in colorful outfits, but they don't constitute a violation on their own in any modern model unless the operator of the model goes out of their way to violate.