Then the site is wrong to tell you that you can use the images in any way you want.

That's what I'm saying.

intentionally violate copyright

Why is it intentional? Some characters come up even in very generic prompts. I've been toying around with it and I'm finding it hard to come up with prompts containing "superhero" that don't include superman in the outputs. Even asking explicitly for original characters doesn't work.

For the most part it hasn’t happened.

And how do you measure that? You have a way for me to check if my prompt for "Queer guy standing on top of a mountain gazing solemnly into the distance" is strikingly similar to some unknown person's deviantart uploads, just like my prompt containing "original superhero" was to superman?

The status quo...

Irrelevant to the discussion. We're talking about copyright law here, ie about what rights a creator has on their original work, not whether they decide to exercise them in regards to fan art.

until they get big enough

Right, so now that multi-billion dollar companies are taking in the work of everyone under the sun to build services threatening to replace many jobs, are they "big enough" for you? Am I allowed to discuss it now?

This is an argument-by-comparion.

It's not an argument by comparison (or it is a terrible one) because you compared it to something that differs (or you avoided mentioning) all the crucial parts of the issue. The discussion around AI exists specifically because of how the data to train them is sourced, because of the specific mechanisms they implement to produce their output, and because of demonstrated cases of producing output that is very clearly a copy of copyrighted work. By leaving the crucial aspects unspecified, your are trying to paint my argument as being that we should ban every device of any nature that could produce output that might under any circumstances happen to infringe on someone's copyright, which is much easier for you to argue against without having to touch on any of the real talking points. This is why this is a strawman argument.

You don’t own a copyright on a pattern

Wrong. In the context of training AI, I'm taking about any observable pattern in the input data, which does include some forms of patterns that are copyright-able, eg the general likeness of a character rather than a specific drawing of them.

your idea of how copyright should work here is regressive, harmful

My ideas on copyright are very progressive actually. But we're not discussing my ideas, we're discussing existing copyright law and whether the "transformation" argument used by AI companies is bullshit. We're discussing if it's giving them a huge and unearned break from the copyright system that abuses the rest of us for their benefit.

a description specific enough to produce Micky mouse from a machine that’s never seen it.

Right, but then you would have to very strictly define Micky Mouse in your prompt. You would be the one providing this information, instead of it being part of the model. That would clearly not be an infringement on the model's part!

But then you would have to also solve the copyright infringement of Superman, Obi-Wan, Pikachu, some random person's deviantart image depicting "Queer guy standing on top of a mountain gazing solemnly into the distance", ... . In the end, the only model that can claim without reasonable objection to have no tendency to illegally copy other peoples' works is a model that is trained only on data with explicit permission.