This is a deliberate oversimplification to try to excuse derivative and copied works of artists who have had their art stolen.

It’s not. You misunderstand both copyright law and how LLMs work.

Models are GBs of weights, typically in the 4GB to 24GB range. LLMs do not look at a picture and then copy that picture into the model. There’s not enough disk space to do something like that. It’s used for training, adjusting weights here and there, based on how the image links to the description. You can’t just say “recreate the Mona Lisa” and have it give you a pixel perfect copy of the original.

When you do it, it’s copyright infringement.

It’s not copyright infringement to copy a style. People do it all the time. You wouldn’t believe the amount of times I’ve seen something that I thought was some unique style, and thought that one artist did it, but it turns out it’s just another copycat artist “inspired by” the more popular artist.

Because that’s what people do to something unique, or even remotely rare: Copy it a thousands times and drive it into the ground until you’re fucking sick of it.