Thank you for the explanation. Let me explain my position in similar terms.
I'm not replicating an image, I'm "using my brain to build a network of neurons that map electrical impulses from the optical nerve excited by wavelengths projected onto my retina in order to send other electrical signals to actuator tissues".
The complexity of the process is irrelevant imo. We can treat it as a black box and look at the inputs and outputs.
If the images in the database didn't exist, it wouldn't know what to draw, and those images are copyrighted.
Everyone's welcome to take a camera, run around the world and label every object for the neural net to learn, like a human does, but model authors didn't do that because using copyrighted images for free is much easier.
You're right that if you're replicating an existing copyright image, the process doesn't matter. Legally, if you lived in a cave your whole life and never saw any art and by amazing coincidence you just happened to paint and sell the exact same painting as some other artist, you'd be violating their copyright. Independent creation doesn't protect you.
On the other hand, under current copyright law, if Stable Diffusion generates an original image that doesn't look like a copy of any existing image, it's clear the new image doesn't violate any artist's copyright.
The debate is whether you can use copyright images/text to train an AI.
Stable Diffusion is of course trained on millions of photos of the real world, in addition to images made by artists. Of course, humans artists also see and digest both the real world and images by other artists and both influence their output. That's why you get trends like impressionism.
I'm not replicating an image, I'm "using my brain to build a network of neurons that map electrical impulses from the optical nerve excited by wavelengths projected onto my retina in order to send other electrical signals to actuator tissues".
The complexity of the process is irrelevant imo. We can treat it as a black box and look at the inputs and outputs.
If the images in the database didn't exist, it wouldn't know what to draw, and those images are copyrighted.
Everyone's welcome to take a camera, run around the world and label every object for the neural net to learn, like a human does, but model authors didn't do that because using copyrighted images for free is much easier.