A.i can absolutely be considered art
Its not true that a.i image are simply made from lage chunks of other artists work copy pasted , that simply isnt waht an a.i does unless you use the very fist models like stable diffusion that were barely functional and and gave very rough results and gave people the impression that nothing much was going on under the hood

Stable-diffusion also ad no understanding of context which meant that each word in a prompt was treated separately like a list of keyword

Now we have models like nano-banana2 that released this week which you can have a full conversation with and can take a full story of multiple page as a”prompt” and will keep evry nuance of the context and will even follow small details and insinuation in the story, you can ask it to make an image from any point during that story and can get exactly that scene with the characters that have been discussed at length

This is more then enough to consider somethimg as an original work and at that point is no more unethical then using a camera for your that uses your imagination

Here they are talking about an image made using stable-diffusion 1.5 or 2.0 which is very outdated so their only metric is that “he tweaked the prompt 20000 times” which meaningless

Ill argue that you only need 1 single “prompt” as long as its specific enough , something 2 lines long can only carry so much meaning but a full page of text is enough to describe a full story , setting and characters in a given situation , specially since current models could take an entire book without losing any nuance from any of its pages

The only thing that should disqualify is if the promt include a specifuc character or artist by name with the specific intent to copy them

If anyone doubts this ill invite them to try nano-banana 2 pro on the gemini platform or sora 2 and try to give them long detailed stories as prompts , its clear that the results are not merely bits and pieces of other works but are is fact entirely consistent and completely logical and dare i say “original work” made by your story and the a.i

all it will take is someong doing a prompt like

“create a new series like dragon ball but base the charicters on the 12 animals of the chinese zodiac and make the villian an evil cat” named Ten Ni
ndo

If you use the latest models like nano-banana 2 , you can give it a long coherent story , define characters and setting , then actualy go trough the events and then pick a specific moment in time , that will be the “prompt”

Everyone wants to avoid the fact that models are evolving very fast and can now understand very large , complicated and specific contexts the lenght of an entire book where has old models like stable diffusion only took in individual words separately with no context at all

So i would even disagree with the court decision in the article and say you do not need to make 20 000 iterations , just 1 is enough as long as you created the context or story you feed in and it has a enough complexity to it , also using a specific copyrighted name should count as intent to break copyright

If your model produces existing images, it means that either the training was done improperly, and you got an overfitted model (this is considered bad in Machine Learning research), or you went out of your way to describe an existing image. Usually it’s the former. Sometimes both. Rarely just the latter.

To finish, the models never even do actual copying. They are glorified denoising filters with a provided hint of “what’s in the picture” (prompt).

Creations are not created in a vacuum, they are influenced by the world around them.

Artists listen to other artists and are clearly influenced. Would we then claim they stole?

Laying a foundation that only 100% original content is copyright free for AI will lead to that same definition for humans.