Inflammatory comments should be welcome. New technologies, when not scrutinized, become tomorrows problems.
Just because the model does not save any imagery directly does not change the fact that the model cannot exist without copyrighted imagery. These diffusion models are being made by humans, not aliens and should be judged as such.
Van Gogh's studies of existing works of the time still maintain his 'style', his brush strokes, use of color, rendering of form. No matter how many times he copies another's work he's still Van Gogh and his work expresses and reflects who he 'is'. There is no existing model from which we can accurately imitate the human creative process, so it begs the question, what is the nature of the imagery generated?
Think of it like your hand writing and signature style. Even if it may appear similar to others, it's still uniquely identifiable as yours. If someone copies your writing style and signature to forge documents, it wouldn't just become ok as long as they forge new documents, in any case it would be immoral and illegal without your express consent.
That is the nature of algorithmically generated imagery, complex forgery, but instead of the forgery being of an individual, it's modeled from billions of images scraped from the internet. This is entirely different from the human creative process.
There is "code as art" where the code itself is art. A while back there was a program floating through the nerd community that was C code laid out in the shape of a giant C, which actually compiles to a valid program.
Then there is "code as an artform". Think code golf, or other such challenges that encourage incredibly creative solutions.
Then my personal favorite is simply "beautiful code". Sometimes an algorithm or a function will just be elegant in its construction or simplicity. Sometimes you have a real hairy problem that seems very complex at first, but the solution ends up as a small, clean function with no frills, no bugs. It's about beautiful solutions more than the text of the code.
Code can be art, but it usually isn't. The first two categories are something done intentionally as a form of expression, but the last is more akin to a sunset or a rainbow. Sometimes beauty appears when we don't intend or expect it. But I think that still qualifies as art.
"Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.
There is no generally agreed definition of what constitutes art,...":
It's a good day to reflect on code recently pushed, or a PR submitted, to retrace the lines and marvel at it (in one's head, on the commute home, or underneath a watery drone).
If programming itself isn't art, the cognition of its product surely is. Art in a gallery asks to be observed again, studied again, brought to the context of each discovered age, again.
Just because the model does not save any imagery directly does not change the fact that the model cannot exist without copyrighted imagery. These diffusion models are being made by humans, not aliens and should be judged as such.