The model is a tool, like photoshop. You as the author of the prompt produced the image by explicit intent. If you then take it and distribute it, you are viola

The model is a tool, like photoshop. You as the author of the prompt produced the image by explicit intent. If you then take it and distribute it, you are violating the copyright with criminal intent that’s demonstrable by the prompt itself. According to some friends that are professors of law, that’s likely the most clear violation. The consumption of copyright material to produce a commercial product without license is likely a civil copyright violation, but it’s unclear that’s true. Browser caches for instance were litigated as copyright violations, and CDNs. Obviously they were not found to violate copyright because while they handle and copy and manipulate copyright material they do so incidentally, without intention, and it functions without the copyright material. A lot of the argument on the AI side, which is likely legitimate legally, is these images are incidentally ingested, the models function fine without the copyright material, and don’t produce the copyright material without explicit intent by the user. The case that are the strongest are where the training data is known to have pirated or large copyright libraries inside them and are used regardless. Finally by posting publicly samples of your work you implicitly grant limited fair use rights to your work. You do not retain full rights prohibiting reproduction of those samples. That’s why artists usually will not post full portfolios. Obviously there are limits but they’re much more egregious than what you see in models where the imagery is consumed into a lossy model that mathematically aggregates it with every other image it ingests.