alt Hacker NewsIt is certainly not trademark infringement, I can say that for sure -- no reasonable person would prompt ChatGPT to create a "new yorker style cartoon" and then think the result is produced by the actual cartoonist in mere seconds for their viewing pleasure. So there's no confusion in the marketplace.
The user could cause confusion in the marketplace of course, but that would be her doing, not the app's. Surely we can all agree that suing adobe illustrator for facilitating trademark infringement of logomarks and such would be silly?
It could be copyright infringement, which should drive home how absurd copyright is as a concept. Everyone's all up in arms about Anthropic reporting a user to the police today -- imagine if the thing they were reporting was that she had written a sacred symbol in her personal notebook...
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> no reasonable person would prompt ChatGPT to create [...] and then think the result is produced by the actual cartoonist
There's also a narrower situation to consider, where the user describes something they "want"--implicitly to find--but the system generates a fraudulent one instead.
In that case ChatGPT would be committing a trademark violation, at least within a nation of laws rather than lobbying.
The article is evidence there is confusion in the marketplace - people are contacting the cartoonists about the fraudulent works.
Now the argument can be where does the infringement land - does it land with the person who generates the cartoon, fails to remove the signature and uploads it to instagram? Maybe. But I don't think we should be giving these AI companies yet another get out of jail "oops you made a machine that does a bad thing" card.
I also firmly believe there are contexts in which merely producing the trademark and attaching it to something is enough to be infringement but I'm not going to do the legal legwork to get there to your satisfaction, sorry.