[livefox]

I had to make an account just to come in here to tell you you are not correct.

Copyright is held automatically by the person who produces the work unless otherwise specified in a contract or agreement. I am a commission artist, and I retain all copyright to all of my work, per my terms of service, unless otherwise sold via agreement, and I charge extra for copyright.

Someone can't commission me to paint something, and then turn around and sell prints of it themselves. I still did the work, and they need my approval before they can legally make money off of it.

The reason why AI art is so devisive right now is because thousands of artists have had their work scraped and the AI trained on their work without their permission or compensation, and unlike a human who looks at other art for reference or inspiration, an AI can look at a dataset and pump out thousands of similar images in a very tiny amount of time.

If the AI author or the user generating the image owns copyright, you can kiss artists selling their own work goodbye. The space will be flooded with "AI artists" who create work at a far faster pace than anything a real artist can create, for a fraction of the cost. The people who train AI on this art are profiteering off of the hard work of the people who spent years of their lives developing a skill.