Regardless, the human generating and publishing these images is obviously responsible to ensure they are not violating any IP property. So they might get sued by Disney. I don't get why the AI companies would be effected in any way. Disney is not suing Blender if I render an image of Mickey Mouse with it.
Though I am sure that artists might find an likely ally in Disney against the "AI"'s when they tell them about their idea of making art-styles copyright-able Being able to monopolize art styles would be indeed a dream come true for those huge corporations.
Now, as for training "AI" models, who knows. You can argue it is the same thing a human is doing or you could argue it a new, different quality and should be under different rules. Regardless, the current copyright laws were written before "AI" models were in widespread use so whatever is allowed or not is more of a historic accident.
So the discussion needs to be about the intention of copyright laws and what SHOULD be.
And practically speaking, putting aside whether a government should even be able to legislate such things, enforcing such a law would be near impossible without wild privacy violations.
No, it would just legislate what images are and which ones are not on the training data to be parsed, artists want a copyright which makes their images unusable for machine learning derivative works.
The trick here is that eventually the algorithms will get good enough that it won't be necessary for said images to even be on the training data in the first place, but we can imagine that artists would be OK with that
They shouldn't be OK with that and they probably aren't. That's a much worse problem for them!
The reason they're complaining about copyright is most likely coping because this is what they're actually concerned about.