>but would call it "stealing" if I pirated all the books of JK Rowling to train myself to be a better mimicker of her style

Can you provide an example of someone being successfully sued for "mimicking style", presumably in the US judicial system?

> Second, the songs must share SUBSTANTIAL SIMILARITY, which means a listener can hear the songs side by side and tell the allegedly infringing song lifted, borrowed, or appropriated material from the original.

Music has had this happen numerous times in the US. The distinction isn’t an exact replica, it’s if it could be confused for the same style.

George Harrison lost a case for one of his songs. There are many others.

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/george-harrison-my-sweet-lor...

The damages arise from the very process of stealing material for training. The justification "yes but my training didn't cause me to directly copy the works" is faulty.

I won't rehash the many arguments as to why the output is also a violation, but my point was more the absurd view that stealing and using all the data in the world isn't a problem because the output is a lossy encoding (but the explicit training objective is to reproduce the training text / image).

Style in an ambiguous term here as it doesn’t directly map to what’s being considered. The case between “Blurred Lines” and “Got to Give It Up” is often considered one of style and the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld copyright infringement.

However, AI has been show to copy a lot more than what people consider style.