[Originally written on reddit and copied here by the author, Harmil AKA Tyler_Zoro]
The USCO has said a generated image is not subject to copyright because:
it does not contain "a sufficient amount of creativity"
it lacks "the human authorship necessary to support a claim in copyright"
it "was not created by a human being"
(source via USCO: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence)
All of these features apply to AI models as distributed via sites such as huggingface and CivitAI. These models are JUST the collections of parameters (AKA weights) which are decimal fractions arranged into vectors called "tensors". These weights are not authored by a human being, but are instead generated by a neural network through the training process in response to input data.
Even more conclusively, the weights are modifications of the weights of the existing checkpoint, and the initial checkpoint before any training is typically either randomly generated values or, more frequently, zeroes. Thus, a randomly generated or zeroed out list of numbers is successively modified by AI. The result has never been modified by a human AT ALL. In many ways, this is less human-authored than many AI generated images, which in many cases begin with a human-authored image.
Thus, AI models, as currently distributed, do not meet the USCO's standards for copyright protection and cannot be claimed as the intellectual property of the trainer.
Is this just a difference without practical distinction? No, not really. Every model I know of comes with a license, and these licenses can be quite permissive or restrictive. For example, SDXL 1.0 is distributed with this LICENSE.md file:
Copyright (c) 2023 Stability AI CreativeML Open RAIL++-M License
... we added use-based restrictions not permitting the use of the model in very specific scenarios, in order for the licensor to be able to enforce the license in case potential misuses of the Model may occur. ...
While I understand and would even agree with their motivation here, I just don't see how there is any legal standing for this license.
Caveat: I am not a lawyer. I have been working around IP issues for most of my 35+ year career on the creative as well as the programming sides, but that is neither a law degree nor a Bar certification, so consult your lawyer before taking action based on my comments.