Does generative AI actually copy artists? Researchers say it’s up for debate

Generative AI has long been accused of copying artists’ work outright (see the numerous copyright lawsuits winding their way through court). But a new study out of MIT makes a very different argument—one that could complicate how those cases hold up. In the study, published in Nature, the MIT researchers Zheng Dai and David Gifford set out to to test whether a generated image can be traced back to a single piece of training data. They were looking specifically at diffusion models, the systems…