If a developer writes their own Stable Diffusion variant from scratch, uses nothing more supportive than Numpy and writes all the supporting code themself, scrapes the web for data themself, trains image generating models on their own hardware, and then uses their own self created tool/system to generate AI, should that be copyrightable? In this case, everything short of Numpy would be the hand written code logic of that one developer (or small team). The data used to train the system could be argued is no different than a person viewing the world they live within... copyrightable?
Stepping into the thread, but as someone who agrees with the copyright office, in the case you laid out, I think there would be a better argument there actually for copyright, yes. Personally, I disagree with the last part (a tired argument about AI imho) but it feels like it would have a better argument.
I disagree with the copyright office. I think my creative output as an engineer is not necessarily less creative or original than an artist. We are making an arbitrary distinction here. Artists make devices, machines sometimes. Is the output of those machines not copyrightable? I bet it is.
