alt Hacker News>would it be legal to reverse engineer (intentionally simple) prompts for each piece of art needed, and then commission either humans or GenAI to create these, to then be able to distribute the remake without any dependency on the original?
Sounds like clean room design. If you can prove the art was independently created, and you weren't just abusing the process to launder the original works (eg. prompting the AI a bazillion times until it looked exactly the same as the original), then you'd probably be fine.
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Of course, to legally be in the clear with AI art you should make sure it's both from sources that have proper licensing to avoid later possible lawsuit implications (Adobe's focusing on this, for example), and also keep in mind that AI art is uncopyrightable. Fortunately, the latter is a non-issue for MIT license-type projects.
In a clean room design, the person doing the implementation needs to have never seen the original. So the same would apply to the human or GenAI doing that in this case.