train one with all the Nintendo leaks

This is fine

generate some Zelda art and a new Mario title

This is copyright infringement.

The ruling in japan (and as I predict also in other countries) is that the act of training a model (which is just a statistical estimator) is not copyrightable, so cannot be copyright infringement. This is already standard practice for everything else: You cannot copyright a mathematical function, regardless of how much data you use to fit to it (that is sensible: CERN has fit physics models to petabytes worth of data, that doesn't mean they hold a copyright on laws of nature, they just hold the copyright on the data itself). However, if you generate something that is copyrighted, that item is still copyrighted: It doesn't matter whether you used an AI image generator, photoshop, or a tattoo gun.

Nintendo would have coup the government if the decision made this scenario actually possible.

Um - your examples are so old the copyright expired centuries ago. Of course you can copy them. And you can absolutely use an image of the Mona Lisa without accreditation or licensing.

Painting and selling an exact copy of a recent work, such as Banksy, is a crime.

… however making an exact copy of Banksy for personal use, or to learn, or to teach other people, or copying the style… that’s all perfectly legal.

I don’t think think this is a black and white issue. Using AI to copy something might be a crime. You absolutely can use it to infringe on copyright. The real question is who’s at fault? I would argue the person who asked the AI to create the copy is at fault - not the company running the servers.

Here's the thing... Generative AI had a plagiarism/remix phase. It raised some serious questions about copyright

It lasted for a matter of weeks.

We're all still stuck up on it, but go to civit.ai

Play with it. Look at what people are creating.

If you're not convinced, put up a bounty for something extremely specific

Art has changed. There's no putting it back in the bottle, this is the tiniest leading edge of the singularity

Or it leads the way in producing the most useless, misleading bullshit more efficiently. We'll see.

Maybe that would finally get them to stop using fax machines.

Reproducing copywrited works would be a problem. Consuming them is not.

In your example, a copyright case would be able to move forward and be tested in court. I would think it stands as good of a shot at prevailing in that example. It would be the same as a case against someone who wrote a script for a website to reproduce copyrighted work on command. The difference is this isn't that. And if and when it does that, the ai can be tuned to prevent it from continuing to do it.

If you make it reproduce copyrighted media, it is a problem.

As long as the stuff it generates doesn't resemble any copyrighted works, even if it was trained on copyrighted works, I don't see why that should be problem.

What media is an LLM going to be able to reproduce that I can't already reproduce with a copy paste?

Copyright infringement is about the act of reproduction, not the tools used to reproduce it. The court effectively said the LLM itself is not illegal just like a photocopier or CD/DVD burner is not illegal. It's illegal if someone used an LLM, or photocopier, to make an unauthorized copy of a protected work though.

It will go to a judge and the judge will say that changing three pixels doesn't make it derivative. Regardless of the method of transformation, the same fair use and parody laws apply.

Why can't I pirate stuff without risking jail like AI companies?