>> Eventually you may hit trademark protections.
> Then the law is broken.
> Utilizing trademarked characteristics to promote your own product without permission is an issue.
It sounds like you agree with parent that if your product reproduces trademark characteristics, it is utilizing trademarked characteristics. Just about at what layer you don't have responsibility. And the layer that has responsibility is the one that profits unjustly from the AI.
I'm interested if there's an argument for saying only the 2nd party user of the 1st party AI model, selling AI model output, to a 3rd party, is intuitively unfair.
I can't think of one. e.g. Disney launches some new cartoon or whatever. 1st party Openmetagoog, trains on it to make my "Video Episode Generator" product. Now, Openmetagoogs Community Pages are full of 30m video episodes made by their image generator. They didn't make them, nor do they promote them. Inuitively, Openmetagoog a competitor for manufacturing my IP, and that is also intuitively wrong. Your analysis would have us charge the users for sharing the output.
> if your product reproduces trademark characteristics, it is utilizing trademarked characteristics.
I wouldn't agree with that, no. To my mind "utilizing" generally requires intent at least in the context we're discussing here (ie moral or legal obligations). I'd remind you that the entire point of trademark is (approximately) to prevent brand confusion within the market.
> Your analysis would have us charge the users for sharing the output.
Precisely. I see it as both a matter of intent and concrete damages. Creating something (pencil, diffusion model, camera, etc) that could possibly be used in a manner that violates the law is not a problem. It is the end user violating the law that is at fault.
Imagine an online community that uses blender to create disney knockoffs and shares them publicly. Blender is not at fault and the creation of the knockoffs themselves (ie in private) is not the issue either. It's the part where the users proceed to publicly share them that poses the problem.
> They didn't make them, nor do they promote them.
By the same logic youtube neither creates nor promotes pirated content that gets uploaded. We have DMCA takedown notices for dealing with precisely this issue.
> Inuitively, Openmetagoog a competitor for manufacturing my IP, and that is also intuitively wrong.
Let's be clear about the distinction between trademark and copyright here. Outputting a verbatim copy is indeed a problem. Outputting a likeness is not, but an end user could certainly proceed to (mis)use that output in a manner that is.
Intent matters here. A product whose primary purpose is IP infringement is entirely different from one whose purpose is general but could potentially be used to infringe.