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The same legal rule applies to both for determining whether something is a derivative work.

No one is stopping you from using similar proportions or colors as Miyazaki to draw a character. You are also allowed to draw your own interpretation of an electric mouse-like monster.

Copyright infringement occurs if that character looks exactly like say Totoro or Pikachu. That is not “in the style of”, that is copying.

A problem with LLMs is that since their corpus is so large, it is difficult to identify when any given output is crossing that line because a single observer’s knowledge of the works influencing the output is limited. You might feed it a picture of your grandfather and it returns an almost exact copy of a grandfather character from a Miyazaki film you haven’t seen. If you don’t share the output with others, it might never be noticed that the infringement occurred.

The given argument conflates the slightest influence with direct copying. It is a reductive take that, personally, I’ve found emblematic of pro-LLM arguments.



Thanks for helping pick apart the argument presented to me.

I don't like the idea that photos I've published on, say, flickr have been pulled into these. Especially stuff I've published with creative commons non-commercial use.




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