I keep seeing people refer to copyright, trademark, and plagiarism interchangeably and, while I'm not a lawyer, I know that the expertise is under contract and those talking loudest aren't worth paying.
Be skeptical of guys1 assertively telling you that stuff like the image below are examples of the the problems above, one of which isn't even illegal. Most of them don't really know. They're surfing your reasonable perception that artistic elements have been appropriated, that it replaces artists who do it for a living, and the obvious off-brand nastiness of it2.
Venture capital is suddenly interested in minimal interpretations of intellectual property law, but that doesn't mean maximal interpretations are the artist's friend. It's the money figuring out how to screw you, and you have two ends. Creative professionals whose livelihoods are threatened by image- and text-generating software like this should be wary of simple explanations at the overlap of two fields of study, computer science and law, which are vastly complicated and complicated in vastly different ways.
1. And me as well. A surfeit of eels at the lamprey feast.
2. "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided." — Brian Eno, 1996
