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.)
The deep-down reason people are concerned is because it reduces the cost of doing it to zero. And that taps into this whole other set of problems where the computer thingy says we can't eat because nobody has a job anymore, or is limited by the cost to automate with a reasonable solution, etc. Plus a whole host of others besides.
I have no idea how you reward significant creative or R&D effort in a relatively post-IP society, where the cost of defining any idea is just some prompt. Pretending like any sort of IP ownership can be enforced in this thing is crazy though. We are seeing the cost of replicating intellectual property driven down to the actual economic-minimum cost basis.
It's absolutely not capitalism's job to ride out the population through whatever weird economic shit comes next, when the idea of IP law generally gets mushy and melts away. Right? There is a lot of managerial or creative work that can be completely displaced by this. Why even have a farmer watching the farm once the cropwatch 5000 is built? And physical labor obviously it's just a matter of cost.
You can't have everyone's salary be constrained by the actual cost to replace, because that's going to get a ton lower. And that's good, it lets us all move up an abstraction layer, and also have more time for leisure etc. It's just not going to be evenly distributed, at all. But we could be talking about a post-scarcity utopia before terribly long, if we want to. Why not just let the robots make the phones and the food and we just hike mountains and do art or whatever? How does an economy work in a situation where most of the actual work is automated and most people don't actually work?
It's super time for a livable, non-phased basic income. It's going to need a while to phase in (probably at least 10 if not 20-30 years) but like, the numbers on the cost aren't going to be any more appealing in another 15 years of watching AI displace everyone.
In general I kind of like the idea of "unregistered vs registered copyright" where you have some default rights of the work itself, and if you register it you receive more significant protections etc. If you're Intel, argue the value you added to create x86 etc and how you've supported it for 20 years, etc. The idea would be to combine and replace patents and copyright and IP in general, you have sort of a "right of creation" or sweat-of-the-brow intellectual ownership and right to exploit the work. The more effort and work, the larger the argument that some competitor ripping you off is intellectually unfair - sort of an actual-damages model.
But I'm also strongly against derivative works being illegal once the idea has been released into the public... but neither do I want to encourage trade-secrets-ism. I think that issue is probably overblown though, reverse engineering/etc can clear up a lot of trade secrets pretty quick. And I think some common-law norms of unfair exploitation of IP would develop (and could flux over time) such that we don't need to go after slash fiction because it violates your cinematic universe, but a large competitor ripping it off might be unfair.
The original creator will always have a period of exclusivity for at least the time to replicate, even in a true zero-IP-rights scenario. Making a chip takes 6-12 months anyway, for example. Recreating some breakthrough drug (hopefully in a better way) and getting it through trials takes time. And nobody is confused by knockoff works from small-time non-commerical operators etc. There are still a lot of factors in favor of actual innovation here, it's not nothing either, and I'm proposing a sweat-of-the-brow system to equalize the instances where that fails or is unduly exploited.