I guess the next logical progression of that question would be in regards to re-use of AI generated assets? While it is hard for AI to mimic some particular person's style without feeding it a lot of samples, if AI generated art becomes the norm rather than the exception, it is very trivial for the same AI to generate more art similar to that originally generated if you've got the prompt and seed. Reuse of similar AI generated images presumably wouldn't be a problem? Likely not a problem for sprite ships, but it might be an issue for backgrounds and portraits.
Unless people are required to give the full prompts, seeds, number generators, etc. (which, frankly, is a bit burdensome and probably won't happen routinely) it's more likely that people will feed in existing images as img2img prompts and try to get "like that", I'd think?
In which case, it's back to, "is it clearly infringing?". I'd think that, for things like portraits and backgrounds, the results will be different-enough that it's a non-issue, unless it's kept so restrained re: prompt strength (essentially, how much noise is injected at the start) that it's 95% the same or better (and it'll be obviously a copy at that point).
This has indeed happened already, I have seen them.
Really? Who and how? Is this some Discord stuff that happened off-Forum? Or did I just miss it? I'm curious now, lol. If you just don't want to talk about it because it happened off-Forum, fine, but I didn't think anybody had the equipment, time or boredom required.
I *think* some courts have specifically said that AI output can't be copyrighted? So whatever came out of someone's prompt is not "theirs" in any real sense. I'm not 100% on this but that's my understanding. If that's correct, then reuse would be totally fine.
Actually, it's more complicated. The Copyright Office thinks that stuff like img2img works are probably copyrightable, but text-prompts aren't, unless they're incorporated into a larger creative work. Threshold appears to be "amount artist was involved directly with the creation". Fuzzy.
It's something that'll get tested in court a few dozen times over the next few years, to be sure.