I was talking about the creation of an ai model. The thing an ai uses to create output from a prompt. Training this thing is ruled derivative by courts already.
Your example is of a real person. If that person has significance to the model, than the model would know how that person looks. Creating an image that looks similar to one of the training images is of course possible. What do you think would happen, if you prompt for the Mona Lisa. This is trivial.
The typical defense of AI art is that it’s not derivative art but wholly original.
From what I gather, it's more a discussion what original means and the notion that all art is derivative. It's a trivially true claim. You do not grow up in a vacuum. You experience things. You cannot paint a tree if you have never seen one and do not even know that such a thing exists. You would construct and extrapolate it from known things, like a shrubbery. And that's how it was in old pictures, when people tried painting animals they never saw. We do stand on the shoulders of giants.
The oldest art you can find is probably cave paintings. What did people paint? Things they saw. How is that "original"?
But this is a philosophical discussion.
Of more practical implication is, that arguing against ai with copyright is fruitless. There are a lot of citations of law suits opened. But what's the outcome so far? The ruling that it is derivative. So accept that and move on to better arguments, if you need justification to avoid ai.
I do not need justifcation, because I made it a matter of taste. I do not like ai in general and prefer human work. I do not need any legal reasons that are already failing. Or arguments about energy, where I personally tried how false these claims are. But this also allows me to appreciate the occasional indie game with ai usage. Just like I occassional play a platfomer, although I dislike the genre.