>Even if you posted on Twitter or something, nobody is coming after you.

Are you sure about that one? Are you saying if you posted say, a racist cartoon on twitter, and you forge my signature onto the thing, I can't come after you?

I don't know about the US but here in Germany the category for this is personality rights. The entire point of a signature is to establish authenticity, using someone's likeness or identity without consent will get you into deep trouble even without money being exchanged.

They didn’t say anything of the sort.

Err, the LLM vendors are selling it for money.

yeah but that doesn't count because .. checks notes .. I don't know, leave the AI companies alone, ok?

no, they're not selling you an image, they're selling you "tokens"

You're confusing their arbitrary monopoly money for their product.

The product is the output, not the tokens.

The product is the thing that makes the output. You aren't buying the output.

Not true in the US. It is true that most plaintiffs prioritize commercial copies, but you can obtain statutory damages even if there are no actual damages from the copying.

Many companies and artists simply allow technically infringing fan art etc. to exist without enforcement.

I remember seeing some documentary about an art forger who donated his works to museums where the authorities were profoundly frustrated that they couldn't do anything precisely because he didn't get any gain.

Edit: the documentary is "Art and Craft" [1] about Mark Landis [2]

> It appears that in donating forgeries to art museums, Landis has not actually broken any laws, even though his activities were clearly deceitful. If he had sold the work to museums or taken a tax deduction on them, he might have fallen under federal art crime statutes. But the fact that he did not gain economically from his actions (apart from a few gifts from curators), and that he addressed his donations to specialists who had the expertise to detect his forgeries but did not, protected him in the eyes of the law. No legal action has been opened against him to date (as of 2014). As one art crimes expert put it: "Basically, you have a guy going around the country on his own nickel giving free stuff to museums."

[1] https://artandcraftfilm.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Landis

Thank you for introducing me. A fun read.

No one asked, but I'll analyze the differences between these two situations. Landis didn't impersonate any living people. It wasn't done against a backdrop of living people losing their jobs. What he made was still art, in that it was both a display of technical skill and worth discussion. Slop is neither. From now on, his forgeries will be clearly labeled as forgeries any time they're displayed. That's easy to do with a physical painting, but impossible when an image has been shared across platforms.

If you're in Germany, I would not be so sure. Copyright extortion used to be a huge industry here for two decades.

Go on, do a disney one!