The legal right that's been violated is copyright: copies of her work were taken and fed into the ML model. This was done without the picture owner's approval.
Moral right may be weak in the USA, but copyright ain't.
Most likely making the owners whole is going to be an expensive proposition at some point.
Copyright law is the right to control a set of specific kinds of actions. A complete list of which ones is at https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/. "Inputing the work to a computer program" is not in the list of actions. Whether or not the result of running that program may violate copyright is a question of fact based on what the program does.
As for what it does, my non-lawyerly opinion is that it is no different than a human artist looking at paintings then imitating the style. Which is very much legal.
That said, a case can be made for derivative works. I don't think it is a very good case, but a case can be made for it.
The legal right that's been violated is copyright: copies of her work were taken and fed into the ML model...
You've stated this very confidently but I see no legal standing for it. Generally copyright infringement concerns itself with the reproduction aspect. Feeding a bunch of images into a model which generates a set of mathematical weights is at worst transformative in nature.
Now whether or not the images produced by this model constitute copyright infringement is a different matter.
> The legal right that's been violated is copyright: copies of her work were taken and fed into the ML model.
If copies of her work are fed into my brain via my eyes, and I then make an artwork in a style similar to hers (but not close to any particular piece she's created), there is no violation of copyright.
The difference is that brains don't get copies of files as input, as you wrote: "via my eyes".
Looking is not copying.
ML models do get actual copies of files as input.
Are you sure? Has this been tested in court?
As you write: "rightly so", may I ask if you are a judge, lawyer?
Has this decision of yours been appealed, gone to a higher court? Does the word "training" as applied to a computing system not simply mean "copying"? Who decides this?
Copyright is still about outputs instead of inputs, just like it is with human learners.
Training isn’t copying. Its an input. It’s akin to “seeing” or “reading”.
Any judge needs to think in terms of outputs. If a system outputs something that violates copyright, there’s a problem.
But attempting to regulate inputs can’t work. For instance, it will be impractical/impossible when we have agents moving around in the real or virtual world, how are they supposed to know when they should turn their sensors off so they don’t see copyrighted material.
