#Disney has such a wide range of art styles within its copyrighted products that it would be unreasonable to copyright ALL of them

[gallopinggallifreyans]

I already wrote a whole thing on another post and I don’t think I made myself super clear — copyrighting an art style is a pretty bad move in the long run. However. The artistic environment in the last few years across several platforms has created enough fear that Andersen et al felt the need to move forward with their complaints. Part of their claims was unjust enrichment; the defendants (various generative AI platforms) were draining Andersen et al’s pool of supporters, which was a tangible effect. Smaller artists are also getting hit by generative AI, which has an even bigger impact on them than Andersen et al. It’s incredibly depressing to see and I understand why they’d go to these lengths.

What gen AI platforms offer is the ability to directly copy distinct styles associated with artists and generate machine-made artwork. Midjourney listed artists whose styles were fed into their platform (quoted in the court document) so clearly they understood this. Users could then generate artworks and potentially sell them which takes us back to the above paragraph. It’s not that gen AI platforms are selling anything directly — it’s that they give the ability to do so.

If people are invested, they will pay a higher price if they think it’s the real deal. Imitation artwork can be passed off as the real deal if it’s done right. But the current attitude online (in the last 10+ years I’ve been around here) is that people don’t like paying what art is worth. This isn’t a new trend and it sucks, but you can see what made generative AI get so popular. Furthermore, art styles develop and change over time, especially for those artists who haven’t yet established themselves. Even Andersen et al had difficulty identifying the particular elements in their artworks that could be associated with them, even though you and I could point at a comic and say “yeah, that’s a Sarah Andersen comic”. So I don’t think Andersen et al or any other artist can move to copyright their styles against other artists without there being repercussions re: freedom of artistic expression, but they can copyright against non-human (ie generative AI) art machines.

Side note: OP, to your first two defensible points: I don’t think those are defensible under freedom of artistic expression. I don’t know the specifics for California, but I know that the US in general has a law protecting that. If it’s the same as Canada (where I’m from), those two points would not hold up, even for gen AI. It assumes you have the ability to avoid seeing disturbing art and protect yourself without external support. (That being said, what is disturbing? How do we distinguish that from “normal” art? I don’t like the implications.)

on the other end the copyright argument against ai art is just so bad. I hate how that's the most common one people use, like I'm sorry but an interpretation of copyright law that classifies images made with generative ai as "plagiarism" or "theft" would be a worst-case scenario for everyone except the walt disney corporation