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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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  1. Find an artist whose style you like
  1. Train an AI art generator on that artists works
  1. Produce new works in that same style, whose copyright you own but the original author doesn't

That seems problematic to me. Especially since if you had spent time learning to produce art in that same artists style without the AI it could be a copyright violation.

I don't think it could, since styles can't be copyrighted. At best, it could be a trademark violation, if the artist in question has their style trademarked in some way. But in that case, the AI can't help you launder that, because it doesn't matter how you copied someone else's trademark, just that you did it. If you put a certain shade of red on the bottom of your shoes and sell them, that's a trademark violation whether you did it intentionally with malicious intent or you did it by randomly placing shoe parts and paint into a duffel bag and shaking them up and out popped, by pure chance, shoes with that particular shade of red on the bottom.

IANAL though, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong.