I don’t think it should be compared to a collage, because that’s not what the model is doing. It’s taking words, and predicting what humans expect to see when given these words describing the image. This is an attempt at generalization, and should start to look similar between models as they improve in quality.

If you take a course on Duolingo, and you learn a language using their copyrighted images, you didn’t steal Duolingo’s content when you applied the knowledge you learned to make creative works for someone in that new language. Though, I think there is some sentiment from people misunderstanding this process and believing that the original owner of the copyrighted content should be entitled to partial ownership too.

I don’t agree that a sentence of text should grant copyright to a generalization of the meaning of those words. I think doing that could be harmful, and destroy actual creative copyrightable uses like if a developer used the model to rapidly develop a game, or an author used it to help illustrate their book.

Though, I am not sure how much the legal system will value the creation of a sentence for creative input

Machine learning models of text are generalizations of what the text represents. A generalization being copyrightable seems like a bad idea, though, I don't think the legal system has really decided. In my opinion, owning a generalization is like stating that Apple should own all color gradients because they used them predominately in their advertising. It seems to cover too much, but, Apple probably does own copyright on final created art pieces that use uncopyrightable gradients to create something.

Using the same seed, you'll get the the same image with the same prompt. Either way, they're both partially a generalization of what those words represent.

> When anyone else, using the same prompt, gets the same image?

Though, to answer them, legal copyright is concerned with human creative effort. Choosing novel and interesting inputs for a final art piece is somewhat comparable to choosing a gradient when using photoshop. The legal copyright being enforceable will likely be on if the court determines enough creative effort went into creating the image.

In the following video a copyright lawyer on YouTube (Lawful Masses) covers the spectrum of fair use and copyright ownership. I think this video provides a insight into how a the legal system might also determine if someone owns copyright to AI generated art. They also recently covered AI generated art in another video, but I think the first video better explains how law isn't simple binary choices.