OTOH, creating a new Mickey Mouse cartoon clearly crosses the line and, IMHO, the AI company should be liable of infringement, since they are the ones who actually created the work.
The court case cited was not split or confused over the fact that what you just typed is false from a legal perspective (although you can obviously still have that opinion). The ruling was clear as day on this matter, even though there was more nuance when it came to the legality of how training material was obtained.
Which was my point, thank you for agreeing with me, because that is just what I said: The article you reference is a split decision - AI can train on works they purchased, but could be taken to court over using pirated copies. Per TFA:
The thrust of the studios’ lawsuits will likely be decided by one question: Are AI companies covered by fair use, the legal doctrine in intellectual property law that allows creators to build upon copyrighted works without a license? On that issue, a court found earlier this year that Amazon-backed Anthropic is on solid legal ground, at least with respect to training.
The technology is “among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.
Still, the court set the case for trial over allegations that the company illegal downloaded millions of books to create a library that was used for training. Anthropic, which later settled the lawsuit, faced potential damages of hundreds of millions of dollars stemming from the decision that may have laid the groundwork for Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney and Universal to get similar payouts depending on what they unearth in discovery over how Midjourney obtained copies of thousands of films and TV shosws (sic) that were repurposed to teach its image generator.
We can quibble over whether being potentially liable for using illegally obtained works means you can't train on them, which lawyers will no doubt make bank on arguing, but until that questions is resolved it remains to be seen what AI can and can't legally use to train.
What I responded to was the OP's Horseshit. Artists, authors and musicians have lost cases over and over again on this; a statement that is partially true, i.e. you can train on legally acquired material but are open to possible copyright infringement for pirated material. That, per TFA, is still going to trial.
As or what you responded to, if you can cite case law where fair use is extended beyond how it is applied currently and thus it is OK to use copyrighted/trademarked to create new works that are substantially identical to the point a reasonable person can't tell if they were created by the owner and sell them commercially, please do. I seriously doubt any court has said it's legal to use AI to create a movie or create art work for t-shirts, for example, that uses output almost identical to copyrighted material and claim fair use. As for the examples in TFA, they do not look like fair use such as where someone is comparing the two for an article (As is done in TFA) , or parody, IMHO, I think a court needs to rule that absent the traditional exemptions, creating near exact versions is a violation.
