personal use exists
That would be news to me. Could you give a source for that? Because it’d mean I would be allowed to copy movies, music etc. for my “personal use” and also give them away because I’m not seeking profit, right?
Copyright extends everywhere, no matter what use. There are certain specific limits such as licenses, fair use and private copies but outside of those, no, you may not make a copy and yes, even loading a file into memory counts as “making a copy”.
How could you save a png then? We’re talking about digital files where you can absolutely copy a file without facing any legal repercussions for doing so. Copy paste is the same as making a copy of a work and would make sense under copyright law to be illegal. But its not because that’s ridiculous, and no one will ever be charged for going to Google image search and looking at a copyrighted picture on the screen. Its also not illegal for humans to learn from the art of someone else and then create similar art. I dont know how you can or would be able to even detect that someone has trained an AI for this purpose. Training modern AI with pre-made models to draw a specific person or character in a specific art style is trivial. Its hard to do it if you’re unfamiliar but it requires very few training materials to become very effective. ControlNet and LORA have made this possible. So how could you even tell if someone made such a model, they’ve only downloaded a dozen pictures and there is no effective way to tell that they’ve then trained this model. It would have to come down to their creations being noticeable enough to charge them. Either through profiting from it or by posting that content online.
Personal use is a misnomer by me, what I meant was fair use.
How could you save a png then?
A PNG of what? Copyrighted material? Depending on what you want to do with it (fair use, private copies in some places) or whether you have a license and perhaps a select few other factors, you would not be allowed to download a PNG of copyrighted material.
where you can absolutely copy a file without facing any legal repercussions for doing so.
The law and its enforcement are two separate topics. I don’t really care to discuss the latter.
Its also not illegal for humans to learn from the art of someone else and then create similar art.
Depends on how similar it is. If the work the human does to the original is transformative in some way, that falls under fair use and therefore legal. If they just apply some instagram filter or something, that would likely not be considered transformative and distribution would not be legal without permission of the copyright holder.
This is the crux in all of this imitative AI art discussion. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work and (closely related) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
Either through profiting from it or by posting that content online.
Note that profit has no influence in any of this except for making the infringing party more noticeable to law enforcement. The law itself does not care whether you make a profit out of a copyright infringement or not.
