No, AI art would exist without Disney or HBO just like human art would.
It literally does come back to the idea that either AI is doing more or less the same thing as an art student, and learns styles and structures and concepts, in which case training an art student is infringing because it’s completely dependent on the work of artists who came before.
And sure, if you ask a skilled 2d artist if they can draw something in the style of 80s anime, or specific artists, they can do it. There are some artists who specialize in this in fact! Can’t have retro anime porn commissions if it’s not riffing on retro anime images. Yes twitter, I see what you do with that account when you’re not complaining about AI.
The problem is that AI lowers the cost of doing this to zero, and thus lays bare the inherent contradictions of IP law and “intellectual ownership” in a society where everyone is diffusing and mashing up each others ideas and works on a continuous basis. It is one of those “everyone does it” crimes that mostly survives because it’s utterly unenforced at scale, apart from a few noxious litigants like disney.
It is the old Luddite problem - the common idea that luddites just hated technology is inaccurate. They were textile workers who were literally seeing their livelihoods displaced by automation mass-producing what they saw as inferior goods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
In general this is a problem that's set up by capitalism itself though. Ideas can’t and shouldn’t be owned, it is an absurd premise and you shouldn’t be surprised that you get absurd results. Making sure people can eat is not the job of capitalism, it’s the job of safety nets and governments. Ideas have no cost of replication and artificially creating one is distorting and destructive.
Would a neural net put a tax on neurons firing? No, that’s stupid and counterproductive.
Let people write their slash fiction in peace.
(HN probably has a good understanding of it, but in general people don't appreciate just how much it is not just aping images it's seen but learning the style and relationships of pixels and objects etc. To wit, the only thing NVIDIA saved from DLSS 1.0 was the model... and DLSS 2.0 has nothing to do with DLSS 1.0 in terms of technical approach. But the model encodes all the contextual understanding of how pixels are supposed to look in human images, even if it's not even doing the original transform anymore! And LLMs can indeed generalize reasonably accurately about things they haven't seen, as long as they know the precepts etc. Because they aren't "just guessing what word comes next", it's the word that comes next given a conceptual understanding of the underlying ideas. And that's a difficult thing to draw a line between a human and an AI large model, college students will "riff on the things they know" if you ask them to "generalize" about a topic they haven't studied too, etc.)