I think that depends on intend. If you train the model specifically to clone an artists artstyle or characters, maybe even use their name for marketing (in the

I think that depends on intend. If you train the model specifically to clone an artists artstyle or characters, maybe even use their name for marketing (in the style of <famous artist>), than that might be a copyright violation and/or trademark violation. On the other side if you just dump tons of artist into a model to teach it how to draw, it'll be a much harder argument to make when the result doesn't really look like any artist in particular. However a big problem with current models is that their vocabulary is still quite limited, so the only way to get some interesting art style with just a text prompt is to have a "by <artist name>" in the prompt. That's rather fishy. Meanwhile if you custom train a model, the amount of images you put into it will be drastically lower and more focused than what went into into initial training, so that's a bit fishy too. Long term I expect art models to filter trademark terms and just get better language understanding or other means of input (e.g. sketches in ControlNet), so that the model ends up being unable to reproduce something close to an existing work out of the box. It wouldn't stop the user from using that model to perform some copyright violation, but it would require intend and effort on the users part.