>Legal liability is completely unchanged.

It's changed completely, from your own example.

If you comission art from an artist who paints a modified copy of Warhol's work, the artist is liable (even if you keep that work private, for personal use).

If you commission it from OpenAI (by sending a query to their ChatGPT API), by your argument, you are the person liable — and OpenAI is off the hook even if that work is distributed further.

I'm not going to argue about the merits of creativity here, or that someone putting a prompt into ChatGPT considers themselves an artist.

That's irrelevant. The work is created on OpenAI servers, by the LLMs hosted there, and is then distributed to whoever wrote the prompt.

Models run locally are distributed by whoever trained them.

If you train a model on whatever data you legally have access to, and produce something for yourself, it's one thing.

Distribution is where things start to get different.