"Stealing" designs from AI-generated "art"...

I would say it's kinda grey area, beacuse even human made designs are kind of a mishmash of many ideas that have been there before aswell.
AND AI generated imgaes aren't protected by copyright (see here) and can be used in any way, as far as I know.
Even big advertising agencys are doing that. They generate an image and copy or trace the designs to thier products. Working with AI hand in hand 

I think its more a question of your own morality and it's totaly okay not to like that practice!
To be honest, I don't mind if someone takes an AI Design, reworks/redesigns it for thier own purposes. I see it like that: It becomes something new with an AI as a base / rough shape.
Especially with characters. Characters aren't only images or certain designs. There are more parts (like description, personality, story) that makes my character, MY character.

But taking an AI image reupload it 1:1 and claim it as your own? ... nah

I wouldn't risk just 'taking' an AI design personally. for 2 reasons:

1) you don't know how the image was made, it could be one of those prompt-generated thing that mishmash everything or it could be an img-to-img things where the design the AI made is very close/almost identical to the source and you'd be accidentally ripping off someone's entire OC

2) people might think you generated the OG picture in the first place, bought the ai design and/or is in support of AI stuff in general

I feel like I'd have to agree - the development of AI was sudden, and the technology was released before legal guidelines could be released; despite the legality being in a gray area, it should be still classified as theft.

If you were to code your own AI and only feed it your own designs, then redesign the image it spits out, that's perfectly okay - and if the source material it was trained on was public domain, royalty-free, or authorized for AI training by its creator, that's perfectly okay too! 

Except, the creators of most image-generation AI popularly available online weren't too concerned about moral or possible legal stipulations when they scraped the internet for images to feed it; meaning, quite a large portion of the training material is likely stolen from the original artists. Unless you train the AI yourself, it's almost certain whichever AI you're using is stealing others' works without authorization.

I'd also need to disagree with @Slothhtols1 about how personalization != theft - if we were to use this analogy, then tracing and plagiarizing one artist's art is much worse than if you stole multiple artists' work, put them all on the same canvas, then traced them all. Correct, the keyword "chibi design" is more likely to show a generated work more reminiscent of the artist's original work, but for every descriptor you put in the machine, it takes another piece of likely stolen work. The difference between bases and AI is that bases are authorized for personal use, their creators encouraging OC creators to use them as a tool; whereas, when it comes to AI, the creators behind the source material fed into it may not be aware or consenting of the artwork usage; neither will they receive anything in return as compensation. 

AyomaHideki

I don't really care if it's legal or not. On the morality side of things... firstly you aren't putting the work/heart in designing the character at all, and secondly you're kind of just riding off of other people's work without your own effort. ("you" just being a figure of speech, not actually referring to you lol). Even taking inspiration + designing with a mix of different ideas actually needs work, to put the ideas together into something actually coherent. though I agree it can be fixed with modification through redesigning, whats iffy to me is that some people/companies wouldn't really go through the effort of making sense of the design and putting functionality in it and just drawing the slop as is.

I guess personally, a modified AI design couldn't compare to the  design born from your own sketches. Morally, it wouldn't sit right with me if I knew the design I have was basically from a bunch of stolen work.

sorry if my thoughts aren't coherent as always lol

also hi maw

honestly I find this topic kind of iffy too. I believe that straight up taking the AI generated design and claiming it as your own, even if you've drawn it in your style, is also stealing. As we all know, AI steals art from artists, so stealing from the AI would also mean you're technically stealing from those artists too-

I feel like AI generated designs could be used as a place of Inspiration at most, but not straight up strip designs from it.