In the law you don't have "implementation details", you have ideas and expressions. Ideas are patentable, expressions are copyrightable, and never the two shall

In the law you don't have "implementation details", you have ideas and expressions. Ideas are patentable, expressions are copyrightable, and never the two shall meet. The exact boundary of those two things is defined by the merger doctrine and the thin copyright doctrine[0]; but for our purposes we just need to know that if your AI art generator spits out something that's "substantially similar" to the original, it's infringing, even if it's not exactly the same. The law anticipated tracing. What you are proposing is that you just "wash off" the expression from the idea and regenerate a new image from that idea. Great, except this isn't how AI art generators work. They aren't breaking down images into their core ideas, because those only exist in our human minds[1]. They're finding patterns of pixels that happen to match the text prompt well enough; and often times that includes the original image itself. Overfitting is a huge problem with conditional U-Net models and Google even released a paper detailing a way to find and extract memorized images out of an art generator. So what will likely happen is that the art generator will just copy the image, or make one that's close enough that a judge would say that that it's a copy. [0] If an expression is fundamentally wrapped up in an uncopyrightable idea and can't be expressed any other way, then it's also uncopyrightable. But if an expression is made up of uncopyrightable ideas, but separable from them, then you get a thin copyright on the arrangement of such. [1] And, also, most humans are terrible at distinguishing idea and expression in the way that copyright law demands.