They do sometimes, or at least they used to. I have some (very limited) visual art training, and one of the things I/we did in class was manually mash up already existing works. In my case I smushed the Persistence of Memory and the Arnolfini portrait. It was pretty clear copycat; the work was divided into squares and I poorly replicated the Arnolfini Portrait from square to square.
Not really unless you have perfect memory. What people do is learning rules and breaking them. The rules exist outside of your mind, you're just trying to conform in some ways and distort them in others. You do not blindly copy what came before. When drawing a portrait, there are the rules of anatomy, perspective, colors and light, and your medium of choice. A style is a particular combination that you know works, but you still have to know the rules in the first place. You study masters to learn what is and what is not important in those rules, not to recreate their works in details. I've not heard of any art classes that train you by copying everything that has been produced.
This is not precisely true. It's been shown that image models can reproduce certain works almost exactly (up to very minor differences). It takes some effort to find such pieces but they exist.
From what I've seen on the art side of things, the more a certain work has been copied in the real world (and thus in the training set multiple times), the more likely it is you're able to get a very close copy out of the model with the right prompts.
For example, I'm pretty sure this is why some models turn up a near exact version of The Girl With The Pearl Earring.
I don’t know of any examples of images being wholly recreated, but it’s certainly possible to use the name of some living artists to get work in their style. In those cases, it seems like not such a leap to say that the AI has obviously seen that artist’s work and that the output is a derivative work. (The obvious counterargument is that this is the same as a human looking at an artist’s work and aping the style.)
Some very famous paintings it can almost reproduce, like the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. It can’t get it quite right but I think it’s close enough to be considered copying. So there might be a copyrighted instance of that, but I haven’t seen one yet.
Let's say we could replicate the painting stroke by stroke. Let's say we also use the same painter. Still, it doesn't matter. A copy is a copy. It's not the same as the first and initial incarnation of that artifact, physical or digital.
Most skilled artists are perfectly capable of generating near identical copies of other artists work. This is something that has been going on for millennia.
That's a really good question, and it's key to the issue at hand I think.
Any competent artist can create a lookalike style of another artist at will. It's just a matter of looking at the paint type, brushes, materials, strokes, composition, etc and copying that.
A better metaphor would be copying and then claiming that you created the original art. Studying can explain but does not replace the subject of study. Producing a painting based in previous paintings can create further problems.
In art is very common that some author review their own work and made several paintings of the same subject. Artists made several attempts to conquer a panting, they draw studios or use different mediums. Photographers reproduce one portrait 20 years later to see how the subject changed. If you insert an IA image in the middle and copyright it, then any posterior painting on the same subject, even by the original author, would became derivative of the IA image that replaced it. This could even go so far as excluding the artists to review their most successful works.
That's the thing though, a it's not uncommon for ML-generated images have major elements that are almost 1:1 copies of existing pieces, especially if the prompt includes an artist's name or a style that's closely tied to a particular artist, going well beyond an artist using existing pieces for reference/inspiration.
All artists of every stripe have studied other art, have practiced what has come before, and have influences. What do you think they do in art school; they copy what came before. The old masters had understudies, that learned a style. Is it not an old saying in art that ‘there is nothing original’. Everything was based on something.
Humans are also regurgitating what they ‘inputted’ to their brain. For programming, isn’t it an old joke that everyone just copy/paste's from stack overflow?
Why if an AI does it (copy paste), it is somehow now a lesser accomplishment than when a human does it.
Every time I've been to an art museum (and this is a handful, not just SFMOMA), there has been a person or two in a room with some, well, art hanging on the wall. They had notebook of the appropriate paper medium and art supplies and were copying the existing work.
Copying of existing works is part of how an art student learns. That this one happens to be a math model at its core is an interesting philosophical problem. The other people's work to serve as your training set is exactly what art students do - and the works they copied and the works that they have yet to produce are not royalty encumbered.
Nor should a mathematical model. It happens that the developers working on this problem have gotten it so that it can do its learning and creation many times faster than an art student in a gallery... but it still can't get hands and faces right.
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