Hubi

their USB stick only contains a shortcut to their actual .ppt file

This happened all the time when I was in middle school. Way to activate a suppressed memory.

It’s been years since the last time that I’ve seen this referenced lol

would it make the use of SD unlawful

Most likely not. And even then, it would be very hard to prove which model was used to generate an image. Nobody has the resources to deal with this at scale.

This would have far reaching consequences way beyond Stable Diffusion. Most larger commercial models are based on some version of it, so it would mean trouble for DallE and Midjourney as well. SD would still be around in some form, because it is impossible to shut down all the merges and versions floating around the internet. It would also be a herculean task to attempt to prove if any of these models contain copyrighted material.