[headsoup]

No, I think "it's going to happen anyway because things happened in the past" is the poor argument.

These AI companies are wholesale scraping art without permission, payment or credit. You just have to look at how they act in other, more litigation heavy industries to see what they're getting away with.

I'm not sure how your argument relates to businesses not paying for artists?

[orbital-decay]

>These AI companies are wholesale scraping art without permission, payment or credit.

I specifically mentioned Ilya Kuvshinov, who is one of the most copied artists on Artstation; you can see so much of his rendering, poses, lighting, ideas around that it gets uncanny. Have all those imitators (who make money with it) paid anything to him for scraping his art into their minds? Maybe he got credited? Maybe they asked him for permission? I think it's neither of those.

Artists have been copying each other much more blatantly for ages, and they never had any qualms about it, they've just been diminishing their own value. What's changed?

[headsoup]

Artists most certainly do care once they have the finances and value to fight/protect it. Not all of them of course, but there's a difference between heavy inspiration and plagiarism, as per the music industry.

I'd say the key difference with AI is its scale, which can widely out-produce any genuine artist by a massive amount x by many, many multiples of 'AI artist' personas used.