two people using the same seed will be able to create the same image.
In my experience ONE person using the same seed will not be able to create the same image. I can feed an identical prompt into an AI artist 100 times and be handed 100 similar, but different pictures at the end. This may change as AI science evolves however.
so nothing stops me from saying “Hey, generate an image of Kirby”.
Every AI image creator has blacklisted words/tags for preventing copyright abuse or prevent creation of offensive images. Most AIs won’t draw you pictures of Disney characters (anymore). Many AIs won’t draw pictures of Jesus or public figures like politicians. No AI on the market will draw you a gory execution. The managers of the AI in question just have to implement a blacklist about it and they can stop you from running prompts for whatever they want.
There’s also nothing stopping you from sitting down at your desk and drawing a picture of Kirby with a pen. When you’re done, do you own that image?
I agree with you that AI art shouldn’t be copyrightable or at least, if it is, there should be some significant hoops to jump through. But I don’t think the arguments given here are good reasons why.
Fair points on the locally run AIs, I admit I don’t have experience with those and didn’t realize they were run differently. I defer to your knowledge there.
I disagree on the drawing point though. Nearly every artist learns their style by learning from other artists, in the same way that every programmer learns to code by reading other code. It IS different, but I don’t think it’s THAT different. It’s doing the exact same thing a human would do in order to create a piece of art, just faster, and automated. Instead of spending ten years to learn to paint in the style of Dali you can tell an AI to make an image in the style of Dali and it will do exactly what a human would - inspect every Dali painting, figure out the common grounds, and figure out how to replicate them. It isn’t illegal to do that, nor do I consider it immoral, UNLESS you are profiting from the resulting image. Personally I view it as a fair use of those resources.
The sticky situation arrives when we start to talk about how those AIs were trained though. I think the training sets are the biggest problem we have to solve with these. Train it fully on public domain works? Sure, do what you want with it, that’s why those works are in the public domain. But when you’re training your AI on copyrighted works and then make money on the result? Now that’s a problem.