A PNG of what? Copyrighted material? Depending on what you want to do with it (fair use, private copies in some places) or whether you have a license and perhaps a select few other factors, you would not be allowed to download a PNG of copyrighted material.
where you can absolutely copy a file without facing any legal repercussions for doing so.
The law and its enforcement are two separate topics. I don’t really care to discuss the latter.
Its also not illegal for humans to learn from the art of someone else and then create similar art.
Depends on how similar it is. If the work the human does to the original is transformative in some way, that falls under fair use and therefore legal. If they just apply some instagram filter or something, that would likely not be considered transformative and distribution would not be legal without permission of the copyright holder.
Either through profiting from it or by posting that content online.
Note that profit has no influence in any of this except for making the infringing party more noticeable to law enforcement. The law itself does not care whether you make a profit out of a copyright infringement or not.
A PNG of what? Copyrighted material? Depending on what you want to do with it (fair use, private copies in some places) or whether you have a license and perhaps a select few other factors, you would not be allowed to download a PNG of copyrighted material.
The law and its enforcement are two separate topics. I don’t really care to discuss the latter.
Depends on how similar it is. If the work the human does to the original is transformative in some way, that falls under fair use and therefore legal. If they just apply some instagram filter or something, that would likely not be considered transformative and distribution would not be legal without permission of the copyright holder.
This is the crux in all of this imitative AI art discussion. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work and (closely related) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
Note that profit has no influence in any of this except for making the infringing party more noticeable to law enforcement. The law itself does not care whether you make a profit out of a copyright infringement or not.