Technology

I suppose that really depends. Are you making a reproduction of Citizen Kane, which includes cinematographic techniques? Then that’s probably a hard “gotta get a license if it’s under copyright”. Where it gets more tricky is something like reproducing media in a particular artistic style (say, a very distinctive drawing animation style). Like realistically you shouldn’t reproduce the marquee style of a currently producing artist just because you trained a model on it (most likely from YouTube clips of it, and without paying the original creator or even the reuploader [who hopefully is doing it in fair use]). But in any case, all of the above and questions of closeness and fair use are already part of the existing copyright legal landscape. That very question of how close does it have to be is at the core of all the major song infringement court battles, and those are between two humans. Call me a Luddite, but I think a generative model should be offered far less legal protection and absolutely not more legal protection for its output than humans are.